Semitic Series
DEVELOPMENT OF
MUSLIM THEOLOGY, JURISPRUDENCE
AND CONSTITUTIONAL THEORY
BY DUNCAN B. MACDONALD, M.A., B.D.
SERIES OF HAND-BOOKS IN SEMITICS
EDITED BY
JAMES ALEXANDER CRAIG
PROFESSOR OF SEMITIC LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES AND
HELLENISTIC GREEK IN THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
Recent scientific research has stimulated an increasing in-
terest in Semitic studies among scholars, students, and the
serious reading public generally. It has provided us with a
picture of a hitherto unknown civilization, and a history of
one of the great branches of the human family.
The object of the present Series is to state its results in
popularly scientific form. Each work is complete in itself, and
the Series, taken as a whole, neglects no phase of the general
subject. Each contributor is a specialist in the subject as
signed him, and has been chosen from the body of eminent
Semitic scholars in Europe and in this country.
This Series will be composed of the following volumes :
I. HEBREWS. History and Government. By Professor
J. F. McCurdy, University of Toronto, Canada.
II. HEBREWS. Ethics and Religion. By Professor Archi
bald Duff, Airedale College, Bradford, England.
[Now Ready.
III. HEBREWS. The Social Life. By the Rev. Edward
Day, Springfield, Mass. [Now Ready.
IV. BABYLONIANS AND ASSYRIANS, with introductory chap
ter on the Sumerians. History to the Fall of Baby
lon. By Dr. Hugo Winckler, University of Berlin.
[In Press.
V. BABYLONIANS AND ASSYRIA NS. Religion. By Professor
J. A. Craig, University of Michigan.
VI. BABYLONIANS AND ASSYRIANS. Life and Customs. By
Professor A. H. Sayce, University of Oxford, England.
[Now Ready.
VII. BABYLONIANS AND ASSYRIANS. Excavations and Ac
count of Decipherment of Inscriptions.
VIII. SYRIA AND PALESTINE. Early History. By Professor
Lewis Bayles Paton, Hartford Theological Seminary.
[Now Ready.
IX. DEVELOPMENT OF MUSLIM THEOLOGY, JURISPRUDENCE
AND CONSTITUTIONAL THEORY. By Professor D. B.
Macdonald, Hartford Theological Seminary.
[Now Ready.
The following volumes are to be included in the Series,
and others may be added :
X. PHOENICIA. History and Government^ including
Colonies, Trade, and Religion.
XI. ARABIA, Discoveries in, and History and Religion
until Muhammad.
XII. ARABIC LITERATURE AND SCIENCE SINCE MUHAMMAD.
XIII. THE INFLUENCE OF SEMITIC ART AND MYTHOLOGY ON
WESTERN NATIONS.
Semitic Secies
DEVELOPMENT OF
Muslim Theology, Jurisprudence
and Constitutional Theory
BY
DUNCAN B. MACDONALD, M.A., B.D.
SOMETIME SCHOLAR AND FELLOW OF THE UNIVERSITY OF
GLASGOW ; PROFESSOR OF SEMITIC LANGUAGES IN
HARTFORD THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER S SONS
1903
\4\
COPYRIGHT, 1903, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER S SONS
Published) March, 1903
8 6 9 4 7
TROW DIRECTORY
PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY
NEW YORK
MEMORLE
MATRIS SACRVM
PREFACE
IT is with very great diffidence that I send out this
book. Of the lack and need of some text-book of
the kind there can be little doubt. From the ed
ucated man who wishes to read with intelligence his
" Arabian Nights " to the student of history or of
law or of theology who wishes to know how it has
gone in such matters with the great Muslim world,
there is demand enough and to spare. Still graver
is the difficulty for the growing body of young men
who are taking up the study of Arabic. In English
or German or French there is no book to which a
teacher may send .his pupils for brief guidance on
the development of these institutions ; on the devel
opment of law there are only scattered and fragmen
tary papers, and on the development of theology
there is practically nothing. But of the difficulty of
supplying this need there can be even less doubt.
Goldziher could do it fully and completely ; no other
Arabist alive could approach the task other than with
trepidation. The following pages therefore form a
kind of forlorn attempt, a rushing in on the part of
one who is sure he is not an angel and is in grave
doubt on the question of folly, but who also sees a
gap and no great alacrity on the part of his betters
toward filling it. One thing, however, I would pre-
vii
V1U PREFACE
mise with emphasis. All the results given here have
been reached or verified from the Arabic sources.
These sources are seldom stated either in the text or
in the bibliography, as the book is intended to be
useful to non-Arabists, but, throughout, they lie be
hind it and are its basis. By this it is not meant
that the results of this book are claimed as original.
Every Arabist will recognize at once from whose
wells I have drawn and who have been my mas
ters. Among these I would do homage in the first in
stance to Goldziher ; what Arabist is not deep in his
debt ? With Goldziher s influence through books I
would join the kindred influence of the living voice
of my teacher Sachau. To him I render thanks and
reverence now for his kindly sympathy and guid
ance. Others in whose debt I am are Noldeke,
Snouck Hurgronje, von Kremer, Lane many more.
Those who are left of these will know their own in
my pages and will be merciful to my attempts to
tread in their steps and to develop their results.
What is my own, too, they will know ; into questions
of priority I have no desire to enter. Foot-notes
which might have given to each scholar his due have
been left unwritten. For the readers of this book
such references in so vast a subject would be use
less. Such references, too, would have in the end to
be made to Arabic sources.
More direct help I have to acknowledge on several
sides. To the atmosphere and scholarly ideals of
Hartford Seminary I am indebted for the possibility
of writing such a book as this, so far from the ordi
nary theological ruts. Among my colleagues Professor
PREFACE iX
Gillett has especially aided me with criticism and
suggestions on the terminology of scholastic theol
ogy. Dr. Talcott Williams, of Philadelphia, illumined
for me the Idrisid movement in North Africa. One
complete sentence on p. 85 I have conveyed from a
kindly notice in The Nation of my inaugural lecture
on the development of Muslim Jurisprudence. Fi
nally, and above all, I am indebted to my wife for
much patient labor in copying and for keen and lu
minous criticism in planning and correcting. With
thanks to her this preface may fitly close.
DUNCAN B. MACDONALD.
HARTFORD, December, 1902.
*^* As it has proved impracticable to give in the body of the
book a full transliteration of names and technical terms, the
learner is referred for such exact forms to the chronological table
and the index. In these hamza and ayn, the long vowels and the
emphatic consonants are uniformly represented, the last by italic.
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION .... 3
PART I
CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT
CHAPTER I
DEATH OF MUHAMMAD TO RISE OF ABBASIDS 7
CHAPTER II
To RISE OF AYYUBIDS .... .34
CHAPTER III
To PRESENT SITUATION ...... 50
PART II
DEVELOPMENT OF JURISPRUDENCE
CHAPTER I
To CLOSE OF UMATYAD PERIOD . . . .65
CHAPTER II
To PRESENT SITUATION . 91
Xll CONTENTS
PART III
DEVELOPMENT OF THEOLOGY
CHAPTER I
PAGE
To CLOSE OF UMAYYAD PERIOD . . 119
CHAPTER II
To FOUNDATION OF FATIMID KHALIFATB . . . 153
CHAPTER III
To TRIUMPH OF ASH ARITES IN EAST . . . 186
CHAPTER IV
AL-GrHAZZALI 215
CHAPTER V
To IBN SAB IN AND END OF MUWAHHIDS . . . 243
CHAPTER VI
To PRESENT SITUATION 266
APPENDICES
I. ILLUSTRATIVE DOCUMENTS IN TRANSLATION . 291
II. SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 358
III. CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 368
INDEX , . 373
ERRATA
Page 30, line 5, for al-Mnkanna read al-Muqanna.
" 86, 1. 19, for first Khalifa read second Khalifa.
" 201, 1. 26, for tasalsal read tasdlsul.
" 237, for Mansell read Mansel.
" 267, 1. 30, for Haqqari read Hakkari.
" 299, 1. 10, for Mushriqs read Mushriks.
" 300, 1. 4, for kalimatan ash-shahada read kalima-
ta-sh-shahada.
" 325, 1. 23, for wihdaniya read wahdaniya.
" 339, 1. 11, for ihtiyaz read ilitiyaj.
DEVELOPMENT OF
MUSLIM THEOLOGY, JURISPRUDENCE,
AND CONSTITUTIONAL THEORY
INTRODUCTION
IN human progress unity and complexity are the
two correlatives forming together the great paradox.
Life is manifold, but it is also one. So it is seldom
possible, and still more seldom advisable, to divide a
civilization into departments and to attempt to trace
their separate developments ; life nowhere can be
cut in two with a hatchet. And this is emphatically
true of the civilization of Islam. Its intellectual
unity, for good and for evil, is its outstanding qual
ity. It may have solved the problem of faith and
science, as some hold ; it may have crushed all
thought which is not of faith, as many others hold.
However that may be, its life and thought are a
unity.
So, also, with its institutions. It might be possible
to trace the developments of the European states out
of the dying Roman Empire, even to watch the pat
rimony of the Church grow and again vanish, and
yet take but little if any account of the Catholic
theology. It might be possible to deal adequately
with the growth of that system of theology and yet
never touch either the Roman or the civil law, even
to leave out of our view the canon law itself. In
Europe the State may rule the Church, or the Church
may rule the State ; or they may stand side by side
in somewhat dubious amity, supposedly taking no
3
4 INTRODUCTION
account each of the other. But in Muslim countries,
Church and State are one indissolubly, and until the
very essence of Islam passes away, that unity cannot
be relaxed. The law of the land, too, is, in theory,
the law of the Church. \ In the earlier days at least,
canon and civil law were one. Thus we can never
say in Islam, " he is a great lawyer ; he, a great
theologian ; he, a great statesman." One man may
be all three, almost he must be all three, if he is to
be any one. The statesman may not practice theol
ogy or law, but his training, in great part, will be
that of a theologian and a legist. The theologian-
legist may not be a man of action, but he will be a
court of ultimate appeal on the theory of the state.
He will pass upon treaties ; decide disputed succes
sions ; assign to each his due rank and title. He will
tell the Commander of the Faithful himself what he
may do and what, by law, lies beyond his reach.
It was, then, under the pressure of necessity only
that the following sketch of the development of Mus
lim thought was divided into three parts. By no
possible arrangement did it seem feasible to treat
the whole at once. Intolerable confusions and unin
telligible complications would, to all appearance, be
the result. As the most concrete and simple side,
the development of the state is taken first. Second,
on account of the shortness of the course which it
ran, comes the development of the legal ideas and
schools. Third comes the long and thrice compli
cated thread of theological thought. It is for the
student to hold firmly in mind that this division is
purely mechanical and for convenience only ; that it
INTRODUCTION 5
corresponds to little or nothing in the real nature of
the case. This will undoubtedly become clear to
him as he proceeds. He will meet with the same
names in all three divisions ; he will meet with the
same technicalities and the same scholastic system.
A treatise on canon law is certainly different from
one on theology, but each touches the other at in
numerable points ; their authors may easily be the
same ; each will be in great part unintelligible with
out the other. He must then labor to merge these
three sections again into one another. His principal
helps in this, along with diligent parallel reading,
will be the chronological table and the index. In
the table he will watch the succession of men and
events grouped from all the three sections ; from the
index he will trace the activities of each man in these
different spheres. The index, too, will give him the
technical terms and he will observe their recurrence
in historical, legal, and theological theory. Further,
it will serve him as a vocabulary when he comes to
read technical texts.
But, again, another warning is necessary. The
sketch given here is incomplete, not only in details
but in the ground that it covers. Important phases
of Muslim law, theology, and state theory are of neces
sity passed over entirely. Thus Babism is not touched
at all and the Shi ite theology and law hardly at all.
The Ibadite systems have the merest mention and
Turkish and Persian mysticism are equally neglect
ed. For such weighty organizations the Darwish
Fraternities are most inadequately dealt with, and
Muslim missionary enterprise might well be treated
6 INTEODUCTION
at length. Guidance on these and other points the
student will seek in the bibliography. It, too, makes
no pretence to completeness and consists of selected
titles only. But it will serve at least as an introduc
tion and clew to an exceedingly wide field. And it
may be well to state here, in so many words, that
no work can be done in this field without a reading
knowledge of French and German, and no satis
factory work without some knowledge of Arabic.
And, again, this sketch is incomplete because the
development of Islam is not yet over. (If, as some
say, the faith of Muhammad is a cul-de-sac, it is cer
tainly a very long one ; off it many courts and doors
open ; down it many peoples are still wandering.
It is a faith, too, which brings us into touching dis
tance with the great controversies of our own day.
We see in it, as in a somewhat distorted mirror, the
history of our own past. But we do not yet see its
end, even as the end of Christianity is not yet in
sight. It is for the student, then, to remember that
Islam is a present reality and the Muslim faith a
living organism, a knowledge of whose laws may be
of life or death for us who are in another camp. For
there can be little doubt that the three antagonistic
and militant civilizations of the world are those of
Christendom, Islam, and China. When these are
unified, or come to a mutual understanding, then, and
only then, will the cause of civilization be secure.
To aid some little to the understanding of Islam
among us is the object of this book.
PART I
Constitutional 2DebeIopment
CHAPTEE I
The death of Muhammad and the problem of the succession ; the
parties ; families of Hashimids, Uraayyads and Abbasids ;
election of Abu Bakr ; nomination of Urnar ; his constitution ;
election of Uthman ; Umayyads in power ; murder of Uth-
man ; origin of Shi ites ; election of Ali ; civil war ; Mu a-
wiya first Umayyad ; origin of Kharijites ; their revolts ;
Ibadites; development of Shi ites; al-Husayn at Karbala;
different Shi ite constitutional theories ; doctrine of the hidden
Imam ; revolts against Umayyads ; rise of Abbasids ; Umay
yads of Cordova.
WITH the death of Muhammad at al-Madina in the
year 11 of the Hijra (A.D. 632), the community of
Islam stood face to face with three great questions.
Of the existence of one they were conscious, at least
in its immediate form ; the others lay still for their
consciousness in the future. The necessity was upon
them to choose a leader to take the place of the
Prophet of God, and thus to fix for all time what was
to be the nature of the Muslim state. Muhammad
had appointed no Joshua ; unlike Moses he had died
and given no guidance as to the man who should
take up and carry on his work. If we can imagine
the people of Israel left thus helpless on the other
7
8 CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT
side of the Jordan with the course of conquest that
they must pursue opening before them, we shall have
a tolerably exact idea of the situation in Islam when
Muhammad dropped the reins. Certainly, the peo
ple- of Islam had little conception of what was in
volved in the great precedent that they were about to
establish, but, nevertheless, there lies here, in the
first elective council which they called, the beginning
of all the confusions, rivalries, and uncertainties that
were to limit and finally to destroy the succession of
the Commanders of the Faithful.
Muhammad had ruled as an absolute monarch
a Prophet of God in his own right. He had no
son; though had he left such issue it is not prob
able that it would have affected the direct result.
Of Moses s son we hear nothing till long after
ward, and then under very suspicious circumstances.
The old free spirit of the Arabs was too strong,
and as in the Ignorance (al-jahiliya), as they called
the pre-Muslim age, the tribes had chosen from
time to time their chiefs, so it was now fixed that
in Islam the leader was to be elected by the people.
But wherever there is an election, there there are
parties ; and this was no exception. Of such par
ties we may reckon roughly four. There were the
Early Believers, who had suffered with Muhammad
at Mecca, accompanied him to al-Madina and had
fought at his side through all the Muslim campaigns.
These were called Muhajirs, because they had made
with him the Hijra or migration to al-Madina. Then
there was the party of the citizens of al-Madina, who
had invited him to come to them and had promised
EAELY PAKTIES 9
him allegiance. These were called Ansar or Helpers.
Eventually we shall find these two factions growing
together and forming the one party of the old orig
inal believers and Companions of Muhammad (sahibs,
i.e., all those who came in contact with the Prophet
as believers and who died in Islam), but at the first
they stood apart and there was much jealousy be
tween them. Then, in the third place, there was the
party of recent converts who had only embraced
Islam at the latest moment when Mecca was capt
ured by Muhammad, and no other way of escape for
them was open. They were the aristocratic party of
Mecca and had fought the new faith to the last.
Thus they were but indifferent believers and were
regarded by the others with more than suspicion.
Their principal family was descended from a certain
Umayya, and was therefore called Umayyad. There
will be much about this family in the sequel. Then,
fourth, there was growing up a party that might be
best described as legitimists ; their theory was that
the leadership belonged to the leader, not because he
was elected to it by the Muslim community, but be
cause it was his right. He was appointed to it by
God as completely as Muhammad had been. This
idea developed, it is true, somewhat later, but it de
veloped very rapidly. The times were such as to
force it on.
These, then, were the parties of which account
must be taken, but before proceeding to individuals
in these parties, it will be well to fix some genea
logical relationships, so as to be able to trace the
family and tribal jealousies and intrigues that were
10 CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT
so soon to transfer themselves from the little circle of
Mecca and al-Madina and to fight themselves out on
the broad field of Muslim history. For, in truth,
in the development of no other state have little causes
produced such great effects as here. For example, it
may be said, broadly and yet truly, that the seclu
sion of Muslim women, with all its disastrous effects
at the present day for a population of two hundred
millions, runs back to the fact that A isha, the four
teen-year-old wife of Muhammad, once lost a neck
lace under what the gossips of the time thought were
suspicious circumstances. As to the point now in
hand, it is quite certain that Muslim history for sev
eral hundred years was conditioned and motived by
the quarrels of Meccan families. The accompanying
genealogy will give the necessary starting-point.
The mythical ancestor is Quraysh ; hence " the Qur
aysh," or " Quraysh " as a name for the tribe. With
in the tribe, the two most important families are
those of Hashim and Umayya ; their rivalries for the
succession of the Prophet fill the first century and a
half of Muslim history, and the immediately pre-
Islamic history of Mecca is similarly filled with a
contest between them as to the guardianship of the
Ka ba and the care of the pilgrims to that sanctuary.
"Whether this earlier history is real, or a reflection
from the later Muslim times, we need not here con
sider. The next important division is that between
the families of al- Abbas and Abu Talib, the uncles
of the Prophet. From the one were descended the
Abbasids, as whose heir-at-law the Sultan of the
Ottoman Empire now claims the Khalifate, and from
GENEALOGICAL CHART
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ABU BAKR ; UMAR
13
the other the different conflicting lines of Shi ites,
whose intricacies we shall soon have to face.
To return : in this first elective council the choice
fell upon Abu Bakr. He was a man distinguished
by his piety and his affection for and close intimacy
with Muhammad. He was the father of Muhammad s
favorite wife, A isha, and was some two years young
er than his son-in-law. He was, also, one of the
earliest believers and it is evident that this, with his
advanced age, always respected in Arabia, went far
to secure his election. Yet his election did not pass
off without a struggle in which the elements that
later came to absolute schism and revolution are
plainly visible. The scene, as it can be put together
from Arabic historians, is curiously suggestive of the
methods of modern politics. As soon as it was as
sured that the Prophet, the hand which had held
together all those clashing interests, was really dead,
a convention was called of the leaders of the people.
There the strife ran so high between the Ansar, the
Muhajirs and the Muslim aristocrats of the house of
Umayya, that they almost came to blows. Suddenly
in the tumult, Umar, a man of character and decision,
" rushed the convention " by solemnly giving to Abu
Bakr the hand-grasp of fealty. The accomplished
fact was recognized as it has always been in Islam
and on the next day the general mass of the people
swore allegiance to the first Khalifa, literally Succes
sor, of Muhammad.
On his death, in A.H. 13 (A.D. 634), there followed
Umar. His election passed off quietly. He had
been nominated by Abu Bakr and nothing remained
14 CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT
but for the people to confirm that nomination.
There thus entered a second principle or rather
precedent beside that of simple election. A cer
tain right was recognized in the Khalifa to nomi
nate his successor, provided he chose one suitable
and eligible in other respects. Unlike Cromwell in
a similar case, Abu Bakr did not nominate one of
his own sons, but the man who had been his right
hand and who, he knew, could best build up the
state. His foresight was proved by the event, and
Umar proved the second founder of Islam by his
genius as a ruler and organizer and his self-devotion
as a man. Through his generals, Damascus and
Jerusalem were taken, Persia crushed in the great
battles of al-Qadisiya and Nahawand, and Egypt con
quered. He was also the organizer of the Muslim
state, and it will be advisable to describe part of his
system, both for its own sake and in order to point
the contrast with that of his successors. He saw
clearly what were the conditions under which the
Muslims must work, and devised a plan, evidently
based on Persian methods of government, which, for
the time at least, was perfect in its way.
The elements in the problem were simple. There
was the flood of Arabs pouring out of Arabia and
bearing everything down in their course. These must
be retained as a conquering instrument if Islam were
to exist. Thus they must be prevented from settling
down on the rich lands they had seized, from be
coming agriculturists, merchants, and so on, and so
losing their identity among other peoples. The
whole Arab stock must be preserved as a warrior
CONSTITUTION OF UMAR 15
caste to fight the battles of God. This was secured
by a regulation that no new lands should be held by
a Muslim. When a country was conquered, the land
was left to its previous possessors with the duty of
paying a high rent to the Muslim state and, besides,
of furnishing fodder and food, clothing and every
thing necessary to the Muslim camp that guarded
them. These camps, or rather camp-cities, were scat
tered over the conquered countries and were practi
cally settlements of Muslims in partibus infidelium.
The duty of these Muslims was to be soldiers only.
They were fed and clothed by the state, and the
money paid into the public treasury, consisting of
plunder or rents of conquered lands (kharaj), or the
head-tax on all non-Muslims (jizya), was regularly
divided among them and the other believers. If a
non-Muslim embraced Islam, then he no longer paid
the head-tax, but the land which he had previously
held was divided among his former co-religionists,
and they became responsible to the state. He, on
the other hand, received his share of the public mon
eys as regularly distributed. Within Arabia itself,
no non-Muslim was permitted to live. It was pre
served, if we may use the expression, as a breeding-
ground for defenders of the faith and as a sacred soil
not to be polluted by the foot of an unbeliever. It
will readily be seen what the results of such a system
must have been. The entire Muslim people was re
tained as a gigantic fighting machine, and the con
quered peoples were machines again to furnish it
with what was needed. The system was communistic,
but in favor of one special caste. The others the
16 CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT
conquered peoples were crushed to the ground be
neath their burdens. Yet they could not sell their
land and leave the country ; there was no one to buy
it. The Muslims would not, and their fellow-co
religionists could not, for with it went the land-tax.
Such was, in its essence, the constitution of Umar,
forever famous in Muslim tradition. It stood for a
short time, and could not have stood for a long time ;
but the cause of its overthrow was political and not
social-economic. With the next Khalifa and the
changes which came with him, it went, in great part,
to the ground. The choice of Umar to the Khalifate
had evidently been dictated by a consideration of his
position as one of the earliest believers and as son-in-
law of the Prophet. The party of Early Believers had
thus succeeded twice in electing their candidate. But
with the death of Umar in A.H. 23 (A.D. 644) the
Meccan aristocratic party of the family of Umayya
that had so long struggled against Muhammad and
had only accepted Islam when their cause was hope
lessly lost, had at last a chance. Umar left no direc
tions as to his successor. He seems to have felt no
certainty as to the man best fitted to take up the
burden, and when his son sought to urge him to name
a Khalifa, he is reported to have said, " If I appoint
a Khalifa, Abu Bakr appointed a Khalifa ; and if I
leave the people without guidance, so did the Apostle
of God." But there is also a story that after a vain
attempt to persuade one of the Companions to permit
himself to be nominated, he appointed an elective
council of six to make the choice after his death
under stringent conditions, which went all to wreck
U Til MAN
through the pressure of circumstances. The Umay-
yads succeeded in carrying the election of Uthman,
one of their family, an old man and also a son-in-law
of Muhammad, who by rare luck for them was an
Early Believer. After his election it was soon evident
that he was going to rule as an Umayyad and not
as a Muslim. For generations back in Mecca, as has
already been said, there had been, according to tradi
tion, a continual struggle for pre-eminence between
the families of Umayya and of Hashim. In the vic
tory of Muhammad and the election of the first two
Khalifas, the house of Hashim had conquered, but it
had been the constant labor of the conquerors to re
move all tribal and family distinctions and frictions
and to bring the whole body of the Arabs to regard
one another as brother Muslims. Now, with a Kha
lifa of the house of Umayya, all that was swept away,
and it was evident that Uthman a pious, weak man,
in the hands of his energetic kinsfolk was drifting to
a point where the state would not exist for the Mus
lims but for the Umayyads. His evil spirit was his
cousin Marwan ibn al-Hakam, whom he had ap
pointed as his secretary and who eventually became
fourth Umayyad Khalifa. The father of this man,
al-Hakam ibn al-As, accepted Islam at the last mo
ment when Mecca was captured, and, thereafter, was
banished by Muhammad for treachery. Not till the
reign of Uthman was he permitted to return, and his
son, born after the Hijra, was the most active assert-
or of Umayyad claims. Under steady family press
ure, Uthman removed the governors of provinces
who had suffered with Muhammad and fought in the
18 CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT
Path of God (sabil Allah), and put in their places fcis
own relations, late embracers of the faith. He broke
through the Constitution of Umar and gifted away
great tracts of state lands. The feeling spread abroad
that in the eyes of the Khalifa an Umayyad could
do no wrong, and the Umayyads themselves were not
backward in affording examples. To the Muhajirs
and Ansar they were godless heathen, and probably
the Muhajirs and Ansar were right. Finally, the
indignation could no longer be restrained. Insurrec
tions broke out in the camp -cities of al-Kufa and al-
Basra, and in those of Egypt and at last in al-Madina
itself. There, in A.H. 35 (A.D. 655), Uthman fell
under the daggers of conspirators led by a Muham
mad, a son of Abu Bakr, but a religious fanatic
strangely different from his father, and the train was
laid for a long civil war. In the confusion that fol
lowed the deed the chance of the legitimist party had
come, and AH, the cousin and son-in-law of the
Prophet, was chosen.
Fortunately this is is not a history of Islam, but of
Muslim political institutions, and it is, therefore, un
necessary to go into the manifold and contradictory
stories told of the events of this time. These have
evidently been carefully redacted in the interests of
later orthodoxy, and to protect the character of men
whose descendants later came to power. The Alids
built up in favor of AH a highly ingenious but flatly
fictitious narrative, embracing the whole early his
tory and exhibiting him as the true Khalifa kept
from his rights by one after the other of the first
three, and suffering it all with angelic patience. This
SHI ITES AND SUNNITES 19
varies from the extreme Shi ite position, which damns
all the three at a sweep as usurpers, through a more
moderate one which contents itself with cursing Umar
and Uthman, to a rejection of Uthman only, and
even, at the other extreme, satisfies itself with anath
ematizing the later Umayyads. At this point the
Shi ites join hands with the body of orthodox be
lievers, who are all sectaries of Ali to a certain de
gree. Yet this tendency has been counteracted to
some extent by a strongly catholic and irenic spirit
which manifests itself in Islam. After a controversy
is over and the figures in it have faded into the past,
Islam casts a still deeper veil over the controversy
itself and glorifies the actors on both sides into
fathers and doctors of the Church. An attempt is
made to forget that they had fought one another so
bitterly, and to hold to the fact only that they were
brother Muslims. The Shi ites well so-called, for
Shi a means sect, have never accepted this ; but it is
the usage of orthodox, commonly called Sunnite, Is
lam. A concrete expression of any result reached by
the body of the believers then often takes the form of
a tradition assigned to Muhammad. In this case, it
is a saying of his that ten men, specified by name
and prominent leaders in these early squabbles, were
certain of Paradise. It has further become an article
in Muslim creeds, that the Companions of the Prophet
are not to be mentioned save with praise ; and one
school of theologians, in their zeal for the historic
Khalifate, even forbade the cursing of Yazid, the
slayer of al-Husayn (p. 28 below), and reckoned as
the worst of all the Umayyads, because he had been
20 CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT
a Khalifa in full and regular standing. This catholic
recognition of the unity of Islam we shall meet again
and again.
Abandoning, then, any attempt to trace the details
and to adjust the rights and wrongs of this story, we
return to the fixed fact of the election of Ali and the
accession to power of the legitimist party. This
legitimist party, or parties, had been gradually de
veloping, and their peculiar and mutually discordant
views deserve attention. These views all glorified
Ali, the full cousin of Muhammad and husband of
his daughter Fatima, but upon very different grounds.
There could not but exist the feeling that a descend
ant of the Prophet should be his successor, and the
children of Ali, al-Hasan and al-Husayn were his
only grandchildren and only surviving male descend
ants. This, of course, reflected a dignity upon Ali,
their father, and gave him a claim to the Khalifate.
Again, Ali himself seems to have made a great and
hardly comprehensible impression upon his contem
poraries. The proverb ran with the people, "There
is no sword save Dhu-l-faqar, and no youth save
Ali." He was not, perhaps, so great a general as
one or two others of his time, but he stood alone as
a warrior in single combat ; he was a poet and an
orator, but no statesman. As one of the earliest of
the Early Believers, it might be expected that the
Muhajirs would support him, and so they did; but
the matter went much farther, and he seems to have
excited a feeling of personal attachment and devo
tion different from that rendered to the preceding
Khalifas. Strange and mystical doctrines were afloat
21
as to his claim. The idea of election was thrown
aside, and his adherents proclaimed his right by the
will and appointment of God to the successorship of
the Prophet. As God had appointed Muhammad as
Prophet, so He had appointed Ali as his helper in
life and his successor in death. This was preached
in Egypt as early as the year 32.
Tt will easily be seen that with such a following,
uniting so many elements, his election could be
brought about. Thus it was ; but an evil suspicion
rested upon him. Men thought, and probably right
ly, that he could have saved the aged Uthman if he
had willed, and they even went the length of accus
ing him of being art and part in the murder itself.
The ground was hollow beneath his feet. Further,
there were two other old Companions of the Prophet,
Talha and az-Zubayr, who thought they had a still
better claim to the Khalifate ; and they were joined
by A isha, the favorite wife of Muhammad, now, as a
finished intrigante, the evil genius of Islam. Ali
had reaped all the advantage of the conspiracy and
murder, and it was easy to raise against him the cry
of revenge for Uthman. Then the civil war began.
In the struggle with Talha and az-Zubayr, Ali was
victorious. Both fell at the battle of the Camel
(A.H. 36), so called from the presence of A isha
mounted on a camel like a chief tainess of the old
days. But a new element was to enter. The gov
ernorship of Syria had been held for a long time by
Mu awiya, an Umayyad, and there the Umayyad in
fluence was supreme. There, too, had grown up a
spirit of religious indifference, combined with a pres-
22 CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT
ervation of all the forms of the faith. Mu awiya
was a statesman by nature, and had moulded his
province into an almost independent kingdom. The
Syrian army was devoted to him, and could be de
pended upon to have no other interests than his.
From the beginning of Ali s reign, he had been bid
ing his time ; had not given his allegiance, but had
waited for the hour to strike for revenge for Utliman
and power for himself. The time came and Mu awi-
ya won. We here pass over lightly a long and con
tradictory story. It is enough to note how the irony
of history wrought itself out, and a son of the Abu
Sufyan who had done so much to persecute and op
pose Muhammad in his early and dark days and had
been the last to acknowledge his mission, became his
successor and the ruler of his people. But with Ali
ends the revered series of the four " Khalifas who
followed a right course" (al-khulafa ar-rashiduri),
reverenced now by all orthodox Muslims, and there
begins the division of Islam into sects, religious and
political it comes to the same thing.
The Umayyads themselves clearly recognized that
with their accession to power a change had come in
the nature of theMuslim state. Mu awiya said open
ly that he was the first king in Islam, though he re
tained and used officially the title of Khalifa and
Commander of the Faithful. Yet such a change
could not be complete nor could it carry with it the
whole people that is clear of itself. For more than
one hundred years the house of Umayya held its
own. Syria was solid with it and it was supported
by many statesmen and soldiers ; but outside of
KHAKIJITES 23
Syria and north Arabia it could count on no part of
the population. An anti-Khalifa, Abd Allah, son of
the az-Zubayr of whom we have already heard, long
held the sacred cities against them. Only in A.H. 75
(A.D. 692) was he killed after Mecca had been stormed
and taken by their armies. Southern Arabia and
Mesopotamia, with its camp-cities al-Kufa and al-
Basra, Persia and Egypt, were, from time to time,
more or less in revolt. These risings went in one or
other of two directions. There were two great anti-
Umayyad sects. At one time in Mu awiya s contest
with Ali, he trapped Ali into the fatal step of arbitrat
ing his claim to the Khalifate. It was fatal, for by
it Ali alienated some of his own party and gained
less than nothing on the other side. Part of Ali s
army seceded in protest and rebellion, because he
the duly elected Khalifa submitted his claim to any
shadow of doubt. On the other hand, they could
not accept Mu awiya, for him they regarded as un
duly elected and a mere usurper. Thus they drifted
and split into innumerable sub-sects. They were
called Kharijites goers out because they went out
from among the other Muslims, refused to regard
them as Muslims and held themselves apart. For
centuries they continued a thorn in the side of all
established authority. Their principles were abso
lutely democratic. Their idea of the Khalifate was
the old one of the time of Abu Bakr and Umar.
The Khalifa was to be elected by the whole Muslim
community and could be deposed again at need.
He need be of no special family or tribe ; he might
be a slave, provided he was a good Muslim ruler.
24 CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT
Some admitted that a woman might be Khalifa,
and others denied the need of any Khalifa at all ;
the Muslim congregation could rule itself. Their re
ligious views were of a similarly unyielding and an
tique cast, but with that we have nothing now to do.
It cannot be doubted that these men were the true
representatives of the old Islam. They claimed for
themselves the heir ship to Abu Bakr and Umar, and
their claim was just. Islam had been secularized ;
worldly ambition, fratricidal strife, luxury, and sin
had destroyed the old bond of brotherhood. So they
drew themselves apart and went their own way, a
way which their descendants still follow in Urn an,
in east Africa, and in Algeria. To them the orthodox
Muslims meaning by that the general body of Mus
lims were antipathetic more than even Christians
or Jews. These were " people of a book " (alii
Jcitab), i.e., followers of a revealed religion, and kindly
treatment of them was commanded in the Qur an.
They had never embraced Islam, and were to be
judged and treated on their own merits. The non-
Kharijite Muslims, on the other hand, were rene
gades (murtadds) and were to be killed at sight. It
is easy to understand to what such a view as this
led. Numberless revolts, assassinations, plunderings
marked their history. Crushed to the ground again
and again, again and again they recovered. They
were Arabs of the desert ; and the desert was always
there as a refuge. It is probable, but as yet un
proved, that mingled with the political reasons for
their existence as a sect went tribal jealousies and
frictions ; of such there have ever been enough and
IBADITES 25
to spare in Arabia. Naturally, under varying con
ditions, their views and attitudes varied. In the
wild mountains of Khuzistan, one of their centres
and strongholds, the primitive barbarism of their
faith had full sway. It drew its legitimate conse
quence, lived out its life, and vanished from the
scene. The more moderate section of the Kharijites
centred round al-Basra. Their leader there was Abd
Allah ibn Ibad, and from about the year 60 on
the schism between his followers and the more abso
lute of these " come-outers " can be traced. It is
characteristic of the latter that they aided for a time
Abd Allah ibn az-Zubayr when he was besieged in
Mecca by the Umayyads, but deserted him finally be
cause he refused to join the names of Talha and his
own father, az-Zubayr, with those of Uthman and
Ali in a general commination. The Kharijites were
all good at cursing, and the later history of this sec
tion of them shows a process of disintegration by
successive secessions, each departing in protest and
cursing those left behind as heathen and unbelievers.
Characteristic, too, for the difference between the two
sections, were their respective attitudes toward the
children of their opponents. The more absolute
party held that the children of unbelievers were to
be killed with their parents; the followers of Abd
Allah ibn Ibad, that they were to be allowed to grow
up and then given their choice. Again, there was a
difference of opinion as to the standing of those who
held with the Kharijites but remained at home and
did not actually fight in the Path of God. These
the one party rejected and the other accepted. Again,
26 CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT
were the non-Kharijites Muslims to the extent that
the Kharijites might live amongst them and mix with
them ? This the severely logical party denied, but
Abd Allah ibn Ibad affirmed.
From this it will be abundantly clear that the only
party with a possible future was that of Ibn Ibad.
His sect survives to the present day under the name of
Ibadites. Very early it spread to Uman, and, accord
ing to their traditions, their first Imam, or president,
was elected about A.H. 134. He was of a family
which had reigned there before Islam, and from the
time of his election on, the Ibadites have succeeded
in holding Uman against the rest of the Muslim
world. Naturally, the election of the Imam by the
community has turned into the rule of a series of
dynasties ; but the theory of election has always held
fast. They were sailors, merchants, and colonizers
already by the tenth century A.D., and carried their
state with its theology and law to Zanzibar and the
coast of East Africa generally. Still earlier Ibadite
fugitives passed into North Africa, and there they
still maintain the simplicity of their republican ideal
and their primitive theological and legal views.
Their home is in the Mzab in the south of Algeria,
and, though as traders and capitalists they may travel
far, yet they always return thither. Any mingling
in marriage with other Muslims is forbidden them.
At the opposite extreme from these in political
matters stands the sect that is called the Shi a. It,
as we have seen, is the name given to the party that
glorifies AH and his descendants and regards the Kha-
lifate as belonging to them by right divine. How
SHI ITES 27
early this feeling arose we have already seen, but the
extremes to which in time the idea was carried, the
innumerable differing views that developed, the maze
of conspiracies, tortuous and underground in their
methods, some in good faith and some in bad, to
which it gave rise, render the history of the Shi a the
most difficult side of a knowledge of the Muslim
East. Yet some attempt at it must be made. If
there was ever a romance in history, it is the story
of the founding of the Fatimid dynasty in Egypt ; if
there was ever the survival of a petrifaction in history,
it is the survival to the present day of the Assassins
and the Druses ; if there was ever the persistence of
an idea, it is in the present Shi ite government in
Persia and in the faith in that Mahdi for whom the
whole world of Islam still looks to appear and bring
in the reign of justice and the truth upon the earth.
All these have sprung from the devotion to Ali and
his children on the part of their followers twelve
centuries ago.
In A..H. 40 (A.D. 660) Ali fell by the dagger of a
Kharijite. These being at the opposite pole from
the Shi ites, are the only Muslim sect that curses and
abhors Ali, his family and all their works. Orthodox
Islam reveres Ali and accepts his Khalifate ; his fam
ily it also reverences, but rejects their pretensions.
The instinct of Islam is to respect the accomplished
fact, and so even the Umayyads, one and all, stand in
the list of the successors of the Prophet, much as
Alexander VI and his immediate predecessors do in
that of the Popes.
To Ali succeeded his son, al-Hasan, but his name
28 CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT
does not stand on the roll of the Khalifate as usually
reckoned. It shows some Shi ite tinge when the
historian says, " In the Khalifate of al-Hasan,"
and, thereafter, proceeds with, " In the days of
Mu awiya," the Umayyad Khalifa who followed him.
Mu awiya had received the allegiance of the Syrian
Muslims and when he advanced on al-Kufa, where al-
Hasan was, al-Hasan met him and gave over into his
hands all his supposed rights. That was in A.H. 41 ;
in A.H. 49 he was dead by poison. Twelve years
later al-Husayn, his brother, and many of his house
fell at Karbala in battle against hopeless odds. It is
this last tragedy that has left the deepest mark of all
on the Muslim imagination. Yearly when the fatal
day, the day of Aslmra, the tenth of the month Mu-
harram, comes round, the story is rehearsed again at
Karbala and throughout, indeed, all the Shi ite world
in what is a veritable Passion Play. No Muslim,
especially no Persian, can read of the death of al-
Husayn, or see it acted before his eyes, without quiv
ering and invoking the curse of God upon all those
who had aught to do with it or gained aught by it.
That curse has clung fast through all the centuries to
the name of Yazid, the Umayyad Khalifa of the time,
and only the stiffest theologians of the traditional
school have labored to save his memory through the
merits of the historical Khalifate. But even after
this tragedy it was not out with the blood of Muham
mad. Many descendants were left and their party lived
on in strange, half underground fashion, as sects do in
the East, occasionally coming to the surface and
bursting out in wild and, for long, useless rebellion.
SHI ITE CONSTITUTIONAL THEORIES 29
In these revolts the Shi a was worthy of its name,
and split into many separate divisions, according to
the individuals of the house of Ali to whom alle
giance was rendered and who were regarded as leaders,
titular or real. These subdivisions differed, also, in
the principle governing the choice of a leader and
in the attitude of the people toward him. Shi ism,
from being a political question, became theological.
The position of the Shi ite was and is that there must
be a law (nass) regulating the choice of the Imam, or
leader of the Muslim community; that that law is
one of the most important dogmas of the faith and
cannot have been left by the Prophet to develop itself
under the pressure of circumstances ; that there is
such an Imam clearly pointed out and that it is the
duty of the Muslim to seek him out and follow him.
Thus there was a party who regarded the leadership
as belonging to Ali himself, and then to any of his
descendants by any of his wives. These attached
themselves especially to his son Muhammad, known
from his mother as Muhammad ibn al-Hanafiya, who
died in 81, and to his descendants and successors. It
was in this sect that the most characteristic Shi ite
views first developed. This Muhammad seems to
have been the first concerning whom it was taught,
after his death, that he was being preserved by God
alive in retirement and would come forth at his ap
pointed time to bring in the rule of righteousness
upon the earth. In some of the innumerable sub-
sects the doctrine of the deity, even, of Ali was early
held, in others a doctrine of metempsychosis, gen
erally among men and especially from one Imam to
30 CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT
bis successor; others, again, advanced the duty of
seeking the rightful Imam and rendering allegiance
to him till it covered the whole field of faith and
morals no more was required of the believer. To
one of these sects, al-Mukanna, "the Veiled Prophet
of Khorasau," adhered before he started on his own
account.
We have seen already that so early as 32 the doc
trine had been preached in Egypt that Ali was the
God-appointed successor of the Prophet. Here we
have its legitimate development, which was all the
quicker as it had, or assumed, a theological basis, and
did not simply urge the claims to leadership of the
family of the Prophet after the fashion in which in
heritance runs among earthly kings. That was the
position at first of the other and far more important
Shi ite wing. It regarded the leadership as being in
the blood of Muhammad and therefore limited to the
children of Ali by his wife Fatima, the daughter of
Muhammad. Again, the attitude toward the person
of the leader varied, as we have already seen. One
party held that the leadership was by the right of the
appointment of God, but that the leader himself was
simply a man as other men. These would add to
" the two words " (al-kalimatani) of the creed, " There
is no god but God, and Muhammad is the Apostle of
God," a third clause, " and Ali is the representative
of God." Others regarded him as an incarnation of
divinity ; a continuing divine revelation in human
form. His soul passed, when he died, to his next
successor. He was, therefore, infallible and sinless,
and was to be treated with absolute, blind obedience.
THE HIDDEN IMAM 31
Here there is a mingling of the most strangely varied
ideas. In Persia the people had been too long ac
customed to looking upon their rulers as divine for
them to be capable of taking up any other position.
A story is told of the governor of a Persian province
who wrote to the Khalifa of his time that he was not
able to prevent his people from giving him the style
and treatment of a god ; they did not understand
any other kind of ruler; it was as much as his
authority was worth to attempt to make them desist.
From this attitude, combined with the idea of the
transmigration of souls, the extreme Shi ite doctrine
was derived.
But though the party of AH might regard the
descendants of Ali as semi-divine, yet their conspir
acies and revolts were uniformly unsuccessful, and it
became a very dangerous thing to head one. The
party was willing to get up a rising at any time,
but the leader was apt to hang back. In fact, one of
the most curious features of the whole movement was
the uselessness of the family of Ali and the extent to
which they were utilized by others. They have been,
in a sense, the cat s-paws of history. Gradually they
themselves drew back into retirement and vanished
from the stage, and, with their vanishing, a new
doctrine arose. It was that of the hidden Irnam.
We have already seen the case of Muhammad ibn
al-Hanafiya, whom Muslims reckon as the first of
these concealed ones. Another descendant of Ali, on
another line of descent, vanished in the same way in
the latter part of the second century of the Hijra, and
another about A.H. 260. Their respective followers
32 CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT
held that they were being kept in concealment by
God and would be brought back at the appointed time
to rule over the world and bring in a kind of Muslim
millennium. This is the oriental version of the story
of Arthur in Avalon and of Frederick Barbarossa in
Kyffhauser.
But that has led us far away and we must go back
to the fall of the Umayyads and the again disap
pointed hopes of the Alids. By the time of the last
Khalifa of the Umayyad house, Marwan II, A.H. 127-
132 (A.D. 744-750), the whole empire was more or less
in rebellion, partly Slii ite and partly Kharijite. The
Shi ites themselves had, as usual, no man strong
enough to act as leader ; that part was taken by as-
Saffah, a descendant of al- Abbas, an uncle of Muham
mad. The rebellion was ostensibly to bring again
into power the family of the Prophet, but under that
the Abbasids understood the family of Hashim, while
the Alids took it in the more exact sense of them
selves. They were made a cat s-paw, the Abbasid
dynasty was founded, and they were thrown over.
Thus, the Khalifate remained persistently in the
hands of those who, up to the last, had been hostile
to the Prophet. This al-Abbas had embraced the
faith only when Mecca was taken by the Muslims.
Later historians, jealous for the good name of the
ancestor of the longest line of all the Successors, have
labored to build up a legend that al-Abbas stayed in
Mecca only because he could there be more useful in
the cause of his nephew. This is one of the per
versions of early history of which the Muslim chron
icles are full.
UMAYYADS OF SPAIN 33
But the story of the Umayyads is not yet out.
From the ruin that overwhelmed them, one escaped
and fled to North Africa. There, he vainly tried to
draw together a power. At last, seeing in Spain
some better prospect of success, he crossed thither,
and by courage, statesmanship, and patience, carved
out a new Umayyad empire that lasted for 300 years.
One of his descendants in A.H. 317 (A.D. 929) took the
title of Khalifa and claimed the homage due to the
Commander of the Faithful. There is a story that
al-Mansur, the second Abbasid, once asked his court
iers, "Who is the Falcon of Quraysh?" They
named one after another of the great men of the
tribe, beginning, naturally, with his majesty himself,
but to no purpose. "No," he said, "the Falcon
of Quraysh is Abd ar-Eahman, the Umayyad, who
found his way over deserts and seas, flung himself
alone into a strange country, and there, without any
helper but himself, built up a realm. There has
been none like him of the blood of Quraysh."
CHAPTER II
Shi ite revolts against Abbasids ; Idrisids ; Zaydites ; Imamites ;
the Twelvers ; constitutional theory of modern Persia ; origin
of Fatimids ; Maymun the oculist ; plan of the conspiracy ; the
Seveners ; the Qarmatians ; Ubayd Allah al-Mahdi and found
ing of Fatimid dynasty in North Africa ; their spread to Egypt
and to Syria ; al-Hakim Bi amrillah ; the Druses ; the Assas
sins ; Saladin and the Ayyubids.
IT is not in place here to deal with all the number
less little Shi ite revolts against the Abbasids which
now followed. Those only are of interest to us which
had more or less permanent effect on the Muslim
state and states. Earliest among such comes the
revolt which founded the dynasty of the Idrisids.
About the middle of the second century the Abba
sids were hard pressed. The heavens themselves
seemed to mingle in the conflict. The early years of
their rule had been marked by great showers of
shooting stars, and the end of the age was reckoned
near by both parties. Messianic hope was alive, and
a Mahdi, a Guided of God, was looked for. This
had long been the attitude of the Alids, and the
Abbasids began to feel a necessity to gain for their
de facto rule the sanction of theocratic hopes. In
143 Halley s comet was visible for twenty days, and
in 147 there were again showers of shooting stars.
On the part of the Abbasids, homage was solemnly
rendered to the eldest son of al-Mansur, the Khalifa
34
IDRISIDS 35
of the time, as successor of his father, under the title
al-Mahdi, and several sayings were forged and as
cribed to the Prophet which told who and what
manner of man the Mahdi would be, in terms which
clearly pointed to this heir-apparent. The Alids, on
their side, were urged on to fresh revolts. These ris
ings were still political in character and hardly at all
theological ; they expressed the claims to sovereignty
of the house of the Prophet. On the suppression of
one of them at al-Madina in 169, Idris ibn Abd Allah,
a grandson of al-Hasan, escaped to North Africa
that refuge of the politically disaffected and there
at the far-off Volubilis of the Komans, in the modern
Morocco, founded a state. It lasted till 375, and
planted firmly the authority of the family of Mu
hammad in the western half of North Africa. Other
Alid states rose in its place, and in 961 the dynasty
of the Sharif s of Morocco was established by a Mu
hammad, a descendant of a Muhammad, brother of
the same Abd Allah, grandson of al-Hasan. This
family still rules in Morocco and claims the title of
Khalifa of the Prophet and Commander of the Faith
ful. Strictly, they are Shi ites, but their sectarianism
sits lightly upon them ; it is political only and they
have no touch of the violent religious antagonism to
the Sunnite Muslims that is to be found in Persian
Shi ism. As adherents of the legal school of Malik
ibn Anas, their Sunna is the same as that of ortho
dox Islam. The Sahih of al-Bukhari (see below,
p. 79 ) is held in especially high reverence, and one
division of the Moorish army always carries a copy
of it as a talisman. They are really a bit of the sec-
36 CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT
ond century of the Hijra crystallized and surviving
into our time.
Another Shi ite line which lasts more or less down
to the present day, is that of the Zaydites of al-
Yaman. They were so called from their adherence
to Zayd, a grandson of al-Husayn, and their sect
spread in north Persia and south Arabia. The north
Persian branch is of little historic importance for our
purpose. For some sixty-four years, from 250 on, it
held Tabaristan, struck coins and exercised all sover
eign rights ; then it fell before the Samanids. The
other branch has had a much longer history. It was
founded about 280, at Sa da in al-Yaman and there,
and later at San a, Zaydite Imams have ruled off and
on till our day. The Turkish hold upon south
Arabia has always been of the slightest. Sometimes
they have been absolutely expelled from the country,
and their control has never extended beyond the
limits of their garrisoned posts. The position of
these Zaydites was much less extreme than that of
the other Shi ites. They were strictly Fatimites,
that is, they held that any descendant of Fatima
could be Imam. Further, circumstances might justify
the passing over, for a time, of such a legitimate
Imam and the election as leader of someone who had
no equally good claim. Thus, they reverenced Abu
Bakr and Umar and regarded their Khalifate as just,
even though Ali was there with a better claim. The
election of these two Khalifas had been to the ad
vantage of the Muslim state. Some of them even
accepted the Khalifate of Uthman and only de
nounced his evil deeds. Further, they regarded it as
IMAMITES 37
possible that there might be two Imams at the same
time, especially when they were in countries widely
apart. This, apparently, sprang from the sect be
ing divided between north Persia and south Ara
bia. Theologically, or philosophically it is hard to
hold the two apart in Islam the Zaydites were
accused of rationalism. Their founder, Zayd, the
grandson of al-Husayn, had studied under the
great Mu tazilite, Wasil ibn Ata, of whom much
more hereafter.
But if the Zaydites were lax both in their theology
and in their theory of the state, that cannot be said
of another division of the Shi ites, called the Imam-
ites on account of the stress which they laid on the
doctrine of the person of the Imam. For them the
Imam of the time was explicitly and personally in
dicated, Ali by Muhammad and each of the others
in turn by his predecessor. But it was hard to rec
oncile with this a priori position that an Imam must
have been indicated, the fact that there was no agree
ment as to the Imam who had been indicated. Down
all possible lines of descent the sacred succession was
traced until, of the seventy-two sects that the Prophet
had foretold for his people, seventy, at least, were
occupied by the Imamites alone. Further, the num
ber of Hidden Imams was constantly running up ;
with every generation, Alids found it convenient to
withdraw into retirement and have reports given out
of their own deaths. Then two sects would come
into existence one which stopped at the Alid in
question, and said that he was being kept in con
cealment by God to be brought back at His pleas-
38 CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT
ure ; and another which passed the Imamship on to
the next generation. Out of this chaos two sects, ad
hering to two series of Imams, stand clear through
their historical importance. The one is that of the
Twelvers (ItJina asliariyd) ; theirs is the official creed
of modern Persia. About A.H. 260 a certain Mu
hammad ibn al-Hasan, twelfth in descent from All,
vanished in the way just described. The sect which
looked for his return increased and flourished until,
at length, with the conquest of Persia in A.H. 907
(A.D. 1502) by the Safawids a family of Alid descent
which joined arms to sainthood Persia became
Shi ite, and the series of the Shahs of Persia was
begun. The position of the Shah is therefore essen
tially different from that of the Khalifa of the Sun-
nites. The Khalifa is the successor of Muhammad,
with a dignity and authority which inheres in him
self; he is both king and pontiff; the Shah is a
mere locum tenens, and reigns only until God is
pleased to restore to men the true Imam. That
Imam is still in existence, though hidden from hu
man eyes. The Shah, therefore, has strictly no legal
authority ; he is only a guardian of the public order.
True legal authority lies, rather, with the learned
doctors of religion and law. As a consequence of
this, the Shi ites still have Mujtahids, divines and
legists who have a right to form opinions of their
own, can expound the original sources at first hand,
and can claim the unquestioning assent of their dis
ciples. Such men have not existed among the Sun-
nites since the middle of the third century of the
Hijra ; from that time on all Sunnites have been
FATIMIDS 39
compelled to swear to the words of some master or
other, long dead.
This division of the Shi ites is the only one that
exists in great numbers down to the present day.
The second of the two mentioned above came to
power earlier, ran a shorter course, and has now van
ished from the stage, leaving nothing but an histor
ical mystery and two or three fossilized, half -secret
sects strange survivals which, like the survivals of
geology, tell us what were the living and dominant
forces in the older world. It will be worth while to
enter upon some detail in reciting its history, both
for its own romantic interest and as an example of
the methods of Shi ite propaganda. Its success
shows how the Abbasid empire was gradually under
mined and brought to its fall. It itself was the most
magnificent conspiracy, or rather fraud, in all his
tory. To understand its possibility and its results,
we must hold in mind the nature of the Persian race
and the condition of that race at this time. Herodo
tus was told by his Persian friends that one of the
three things Persian youth was taught was to tell the
truth. That may have been the case in the time of
Herodotus, but certainly this teaching has had no
effect whatever on an innate tendency in the oppo
site direction ; and it is just possible that Herodo-
tus s friends, in giving him that information, were
giving also an example of this tendency. Travellers
have been told curious things before now, but cer
tainly none more curious than this. As we know the
Persian in history, he is a born liar. He is, there
fore, a born conspirator. He has great quickness of
40 CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT
mind, adaptability, and, apart from religious emo
tion, no conscience. In the third century of the
Hijra (the ninth A.D.), the Persians were either de
voted Shi ites or simple unbelievers. The one class
would do anything for the descendants of Ali ; the
other, anything for themselves. This second class,
further, would by preference combine doing some
thing for themselves with doing something against
Islam and the Arabs, the conquerors of their coun
try. So much by way of premise.
In the early part of this third century, there lived
at Jerusalem a Persian oculist named Maymun. He
was a man of high education, professional and other
wise ; had no beliefs to speak of, and understood the
times. He had a son, Abd Allah, and trained him
carefully for a career. Abd Allah, however known
as Abd Allah ibn Maymun though he had thought
of starting as a prophet himself, saw that the time
was not ripe, and planned a larger and more magnif
icent scheme. This was to be no ordinary conspir
acy to burst after a few years or months, but one
requiring generations to develop. It was to bring
universal dominion to his descendants, and overthrow
Islam and the Arab rule. It succeeded in great part,
very nearly absolutely.
His plan was to unite all classes and parties in a
conspiracy under one head, promising to each indi
vidual the things which he considered most desir
able. For the Shi ites, it was to be a Shi ite conspir
acy ; for the Kharijites, it took a Kharijite tinge ;
for Persian nationalists, it was anti-Arab; for free
thinkers, it was frankly nihilistic. Abd Allah him-
A UNIQUE CONSPIKACY 41
self seems to have been a sceptic of the most refined
stamp. The working of this plan was achieved by
a system of grades like those in freemasonry. His
emissaries went out, settled each in a village and
gradually won the confidence of its inhabitants. A
marked characteristic of the time was unrest and
general hostility to the government. Thus, there
was an excellent field for work. To the enormous
majority of those involved in it the conspiracy was
Shi ite only, and it has been regarded as such by
many of its historians ; but it is now tolerably plain
how simply nihilistic were its ultimate principles.
The first object of the missionary was to excite re
ligious doubt in the mind of his subject, by pointing
out curious difficulties and subtle questions in theol
ogy. At the same time he hinted that there were
those who could answer these questions. If his sub
ject proved tractable and desired to learn further, an
oath of secrecy and absolute obedience and a fee
were demanded all quite after the modern fashion.
Then he was led up through several grades, gradu
ally shaking his faith in orthodox Islam and its
teachers and bringing him to believe in the idea of
an Imam, or guide in religious things, till the fourth
grade was reached. There the theological system
was developed, and Islam, for the first time, abso
lutely deserted. We have dealt already with the
doctrine of the Hidden Imam and with the present-
day creed of Persia, that the twelfth in descent from
Ali is in hiding and will return when his time comes.
But down the same line of descent seven Imams had
been reckoned to a certain vanished Isma il, and this
42 CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT
Isma il was adopted by Abd Allah ibn Maymun as
his Imam and as titular head of his conspiracy.
Hence, his followers are called Isma ilians and Sev-
eners (Sab iya). The story which is told of the split
between the Seveners and the Twelvers, which were
to be, is characteristic of the whole movement and of
the wider divergence of the Seveners from ordinary
Islam and its laws. The sixth Imam was Ja far as-
Sadiq (d. A.H. 148) ; he appointed his son Isma il as
his successor. But Isma il was found drunk on one
occasion, and his father in wrath passed the Imamship
on to his brother, Musa al-Qazam, who is accord
ingly reckoned as seventh Imam by the Twelvers.
One party, however, refused to recognize this trans
fer. Ismail s drunkenness, they held, was a proof of
his greater spirituality of mind ; he did not follow the
face- value (zahr) of the law, but its hidden meaning
(batii). This is an example of a tendency, strong in
Shi ism, to find a higher spiritual meaning lying
within the external or verbal form of the law ; and in
proportion as a sect exalted AH, so it diverged from
literal acceptance of the Qur an. The most extreme
Shi ites, who tended to deify their Imam, were
known on that account as Batinites or Innerites.
On this more hereafter.
But to return to the Seveners : in the fourth grade
a further refinement was added. Everything went in
sevens, the Prophets as well as the Imams. The
Prophets had been Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses,
Jesus, Muhammad and Isma il, or rather his son
Muhammad, for Isma il himself had died in his
father s lifetime. Each of these Prophets had had a
THE SYSTEM OF SEVENS 43
helper. The helper of Adam had been Seth; of
Noah, Shem ; and the helper of Muhammad, the son
of Isma il, was Abd Allah ibn Maymun himself. Be
tween each pair of Prophets there came six Imams
it must be remembered that the world was never left
without an Imam but these Imams had had no rev
elation to make ; were only guides to already re
vealed truth. Thus, we have a series of seven times
seven Imams, the first, and thereafter each seventh,
having the superior dignity of Prophet. The last of
the forty-nine Imams, this Muhammad ibn Isma il, is
the greatest and last of the Prophets, and Abd Allah
ibn Maymun has to prepare the way for him and to
aid him generally. It is at this point that the ad
herent of this system ceases to be a Muslim. The
idea of a series of Prophets is genuinely Islamic, but
Muhammad, in Muslim theology, is the last of the
Prophets and the greatest, and after him there will
come no more.
Such, then, was the system that those who passed
the fourth degree learned and accepted. The great
majority did not pass beyond ; but those who were
judged worthy were admitted to three further degrees.
In these degrees, their respect for religious teaching
of every kind, doctrinal, moral, ritual, was gradually
undermined ; the Prophets and their works were de
preciated and philosophy and philosophers put in
their place. The end was to lead the very few who
were admitted to the inmost secrets of the conspiracy
to the same position as its founder. It is clear what
a tremendous weapon, or rather machine, was thus
created. Each man was given the amount of light he
44 CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT
could bear and which was suited to his prejudices,
and he was made to believe that the end of the whole
work would be the attaining of what he regarded as
most desirable. The missionaries were all things to
all men, in the broadest sense, and could work with
a Kharijite fanatic, who longed for the days of Umar ;
a Bedawi Arab, whose only idea was plunder ; a
Persian driven to wild cries and tears by the thought
of the fate of AH, the well-beloved, and of his sons;
a peasant, who did not care for any family or religion
but only wished to live in peace and be let alone by
the tax-gatherers ; a Syrian mystic, who did not know
very well what he thought, but lived in a world of
dreams ; or a materialist, whose desire was to clear
all religions out of the way and give humanity a
chance. All was fish that came to their net. So the
long seed-planting went on. Abd Allah ibn Maynmn
had to flee to Salamiya in Syria, died there and went
to his own place if he got his deserts, no desirable
one and Ahmad, his son or grandson, took up the
work in his stead. With him the movement tends to
the surface, and we begin to touch hard facts and
dates. In southern Mesopotamia what is called the
Arab Iraq we find a sect appearing, nicknamed Qar-
matians, from one of their leaders. In A.H. 277
(A.D. 890-1) they were sufficiently numerous and
knew their strength enough to hold a fortress and
thus enter upon open rebellion. They were peasants,
we must remember, Nabateans and no Arabs, only
Muslims by compulsion, and thus what we have here
is really a Jacquerie, or Peasants War. But a dis
turbance of any kind suited the Isma ilians. From
UBAYD ALLAH AL-MAHDI 45
there the rising spread into Bahrayn and on to south
Arabia, varying in its character with the character of
the people.
But there was another still more important devel
opment in progress. A missionary had gone to North
Africa and there worked with success among the
Berber tribes about Constantine, in what is now
Algeria. These have always been ready for any
change. He gave himself out as forerunner of the
Mahdi, promised them the good of both worlds, and
called them to arms. The actual rising was in A.H.
269 (A.D. 902). Then there appeared among them
Sa id, the son of Ahmad, the son of Abd Allah, the
son of Maymun the oculist; but it was not under
that name. He was now Ubayd Allah al-Mahdi him
self, a descendant of Ali and of Muhammad ibn
Isma il, for whom his ancestors were supposed to
have worked and builtup this conspiracy. In A.H
296 (A.D. 909) he was saluted as Commander of the
Faithful, with the title of al-Mahdi. So far the con
spiracy had succeeded. This Fatimid dynasty, so
they called themselves from Fatima, their alleged
ancestress, the daughter of Muhammad, conquered
Egypt and Syria half a century later and held them
till A.H. 567 (A.D. 1171). When in A.H. 317 the Umay-
yads of Cordova also claimed the Khalifate and used
the title, there were three Commanders of the Faith
ful at one time in the Muslim world. Yet it should
be noticed that the constitutional position of these
Umayyads was essentially different from that of the
Fatimids. To the Fatimids, the Abbasids were usurp
ers. The Umayyads of Cordova, on the other hand,
46 CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT
held, like the Zajdites and some jurisconsults of the
highest rank, that, when Muslim countries were so far
apart that the authority of the ruler of the one could
not make itself felt in the other, it was lawful to have
two Imams, each a true Successor of the Prophet.
The good of the people of Muhammad demanded it.
Still, the unity of the Khalifate is the more regular
doctrine.
But only half of the work was done. Islam stood
as firmly as ever and the conspiracy had only pro
duced a schism in the faith and had not destroyed
it. Ubayd Allah was in the awkward position, on
the one hand, of ruling a people who were in great
bulk fanatical Muslims and did not understand
any jesting with their religion, and, on the other
hand, of being head of a conspiracy to destroy that
very religion. The Syrians and Arabs had appar
ently taken more degrees than the Egyptians and
North Africans, and Ubayd Allah found himself
between the devil and the deep sea. The Qarma-
tians in Arabia plundered the pilgrim caravans,
stormed the holy city Mecca, and, most terrible of
all, carried off the sacred black stone. When an
enormous ransom was offered for the stone, they de
clined they had orders not to send it back. Every
one understood that the orders were from Africa. So
Ubayd Allah found it advisable to address them in a
public letter, exhorting them to be better Muslims.
The writing and reading of this letter must have been
accompanied by mirth, at any rate no attention was
paid to it by the Qarmatians. It was not till the
time of the third Fatimid Khalifa that they were
AL-HAKIM 47
permitted to do business with that stone. Then
they sent it back with the explanatory or apolo
getic remark that they had carried it off under
orders and now sent it back under orders. Mean
while the Fatimid dynasty was running its course in
Egypt but without turning the people of Egypt from
Islam. Yet it produced one strange personality and
two sects, stranger even than the sect to which it
itself owed its origin. The personality is that of al-
Hakim Bi amrillah, who still remains one of the great
est mysteries that are to be met with in history. In
many ways he reminds us curiously of the madness
of the Julian house; and, in truth, such a secret
movement as that of which he was a part, carried
on through generations from father to son, could not
but leave a trace on the brain. We must remember
that the Khalifa of the time was not always of neces
sity the head of the conspiracy, or even fully initi
ated into it. In the latter part of the Fatimid rule
we find distinct traces of such a power behind the
throne, consisting, as we may imagine, of descendants
and pupils of those who had been fully initiated
from the first and had passed through all the grades.
In the case of al-Hakim, it is possible, even, to
trace, to a certain extent, the development of his in
itiation. During the first part of his reign he was
fanatically Muslim and Shi ite. He persecuted
alternately the Christians and the Jews, and then
the orthodox and the Shi ites. In the latter part,
there was a change. He had, apparently, reached a
point of philosophical indifference, for the persecu
tions of Christians and Jews ceased, and those who
48 CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT
had been forced to embrace Islam were permitted to
relapse. This last was without parallel, till in 1844
Lord Stratford de Redcliffe wrung from the Porte
the concession that a Muslim who apostatized to
Christianity should not be put to death. But,
mingled with this indifference, there appeared a
strange but regular development of Shi ite doctrine.
Some of his followers began to proclaim openly that
the deity was incarnate in him, and it was evident
that he himself accepted and believed this. But
the Egyptian populace would have none of it, and the
too rash innovators had to flee. Some went to the
Lebanon and there preached to the native moun
tain tribes. The results of their labors are the
Druses of to-day, who worship al- Hakim still and
expect his return to introduce the end of all things.
Finally, al-Hakim vanished on the night of February
12, A.D. 1021, and left a mystery unread to this day.
Whether he was murdered, and if so why, or van
ished of free-will, and if so again w r hy, we have no
means of telling. Our guess will depend upon our
reading of his character. So much is certain, that he
was a ruler of the autocratic type, who introduced
many reforms, most of which the people of his time
could not in the least understand and therefore mis
represented as the mere whims of a tyrant, and many
of which, from our ignorance, are still obscure to us.
If we can imagine such a man of strong personality
and desire for the good of his people but with a
touch of madness in the brain, cast thus in the
midst between his orthodox subjects and a wholly
unbelieving inner government, we shall perhaps
THE ASSASSINS 49
have the clew to the strange stories told of
him.
Another product of this conspiracy, and the last to
which we shall refer, is the sect known as the As
sassins, whose Grand Master was a name of terror to
the Crusaders as the Old Man of the Mountain. It,
too, was founded, and apparently for a purpose of
personal vengeance, by a Persian who began as a
Shi ite and ended as nothing. He came to Egypt,
studied under the Fatimids they had established at
Cairo a great school of science and returned to
Persia as their agent to carry on their propaganda.
His methods were the same as theirs, with a differ
ence. That was the reduction of assassination to a
fine art. From his eagle s nest of Alamut such is
the meaning of the name and later from Masyaf in
the Lebanon and other mountain fortresses, he and
his successors spread terror through Persia and
Syria and were only finally stamped out by the Mon
gol flood under Hulagu in the middle of the seventh
centur} r of the Hijra (the 13th A.D.). Of the sect
there are still scattered remnants in Syria and India,
and as late as 1866 an English judge at Bombay had
to decide a case of disputed succession according to
the law of the Assassins. Finally, the Fatimid
dynasty itself fell before the Kurd, Salah ad-Din,
the Saladin of our annals, and Egypt was again or
thodox.
CHAPTER III
The problem of the Abbasids ; the House of Barmak ; the crum
bling of the empire ; the Praetorians of Baghdad ; the Buway-
hids ; the situation of the Khalifa under them ; the Saljuqs ; the
possibilities of development under them ; the Mongols and the
Abbasid end ; the Egyptian Abbasids ; the Ottoman Sultans,
their heirs ; theory of the Khalif ate ; the modern situation ;
the signs of sovereignty for Muslims ; five grounds of the claim
of the Ottoman Sultan ; the consequences for the Sultan ; other
Muslim constitutions ; the ShNtes ; the Ibadites ; the Wahha-
bites ; the Brotherhood of as-Sanusi.
WE must now return to the Abbasids, whose em
pire we left crumbling away. It was a shrewd stroke
of policy on the part of its founder to put the new
capital, Baghdad, on the Tigris, right between Per
sia, Syria and Arabia. For the only hope of perma
nence to the empire lay in welding these into a unity.
For a short time, in the hands of the first vigorous
rulers, and, especially, during fifty years of guidance
by the House of Barmak Persians who flung in
their lot with the Abbasids and were their stay till
the madness of Harun ar-Eashid cast them down
this seemed to be succeeding ; but, just as the em
pire of Charlemagne melted under his sons, so did
the empire of al-Mansur and al-Ma inun. The Bed-
awi tribes fell back into the desert and to the free
chaos of the old pre-Islamic life. As the great phil
osophical historian, Ibn Khaldun, has remarked, the
Arabs by their nature are incapable of founding an
50
CRUMBLING OF $HE EMPIREJ 51
empire except when united by religious enthusiasm,
and are of all peoples least capable of governing an
empire when founded. After the first Abbasids, it is
a fatal error to view the Muslim dynasties as Arab
or to speak of the Muslim civilization as Arabian.
The conquered peoples overcame their conquerors.
Persian nationalism reasserted itself and in native
independent dynasties flung off the Arab yoke.
These dynasties were mostly Shi ite ; Shi isrn, in
great part, is the revolt of the Aryan against Semit
ic monotheism. The process in all this was gradual
but certain. Governors of provinces revolted and
became semi-independent. Sometimes they acknowl
edged a shadowy sovereignty of the Khalifa, by hav
ing his name on their coins and in the Friday prayers ;
sometimes they did not. At other times they were,
or claimed to be, Alids, and when Alids revolted,
they revolted absolutely. With them, it was a ques
tion of conscience. At last, not even in his own City
of Peace or in his own palace was the Khalifa mas
ter. As in Rome, so in Baghdad, a body-guard of
mercenaries assumed control and their leader was de
facto ruler. Later, from A.H. 320 to 447 (A.D. 932-
1055), the Sunnite Khalifa found himself the ward
and puppet of the Shi ite Buwayhids. Baghdad it
self they held from 334. But still, a curious spiritu
al value we cannot call it authority was left to the
shadowy successors of Muhammad. Muslim princes
even in far-off India did not feel quite safe upon
their thrones unless they had been solemnly in
vested by the Khalifa and given their fitting title.
Those very rulers in whose power the Khalifa s life
52 CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT
lay sought sanction from him for their rule. At one
time there seemed to be some hope that the fatal
unity oftheocratical Islam wo uld be broken and that
a dualism with promise of development through con
flict such as the rivalry between Pope and Emperor
which kept Europe alive and prevented both State
and Church from falling into decrepit decay might
grow up ; that the Khalifa might become a purely
spiritual ruler with functions of his own, ruling with
mutual subordination and co-ordinate jurisdiction be
side a temporal Sultan. The Buwayhids were Shi -
ites and merely tolerated, for state reasons, the im
pieties of the Sunnite Khalifas. But in 447 (A.D.
1055), Tughril Beg, the Saljuq, entered Baghdad,
was proclaimed Sultan of the Muslims and freed the
Khalifa from the Shi ite yoke. By 470, all western
Asia, from the borders of Afghanistan to those of
Egypt and the Greek Empire, were Saljuq. With
the Saljuq Sultan as Emperor and the Khalifa as
Pope, there was a chance that the Muslim State might
enter on a stage of healthy growth through conflict.
But that was not to be. Neither State nor Church
rose to the great opportunity and the experiment was
finally and forever cut off by the Mongol flood.
When the next great Sultanate that of the Ottoman
Turks arose, it gathered into its hands the reins of
the Khalifate as well. This is what might have been
in Islam, built on actual history in Europe. The
situation that did arise in Islam may become more
clear to us if we can imagine that in Europe the vast
plans of Gregory VII. had been carried out and the
Pope had become the temporal as well as the spiritual
SOVEEEIGNTY OF KHALIFATE 53
head of the Christian world. Such a situation would
have been similar to that in the world of Islam at its
earliest time during some few years under the dynasty
of the Umayyads, when the one temporal and spirit
ual sovereign ruled from Samarqand to Spain. Then
we can imagine how the vast fabric of such an impe
rial system broke down by its own weight. Under
conflicting claims of legitimacy, an anti-Pope arose
and the great schism began. Thereafter the process
of disintegration was still more rapid. Provinces
rose in insurrection and dropped away from each
rival Pope. Kingdoms grew up and the sovereigns
over them professed themselves to be the lieutenants
of the supreme Pontiff and sought investiture from
him. Last, the States of the Church itself all that
was left to it came under the rule of some one of
these princes and the Pope was, to all intents, a pris
oner in his own palace. Yet the sovereignty of the
Khalifa was not simply a legal fiction, any more than
that of the Pope would have been in the parallel just
sketched. The Muslim princes thought it well to
seek spiritual recognition from him, just as Napoleon
I. found it prudent to have himself crowned by Pius
VII.
But a wave was soon to break in and sweep away
all these forms. It came with the Mongols under
Hulagu, who passed from the destruction of the As
sassins to the destruction of Baghdad and the Kha-
lifate. In A.H. 656 (A.D. 1258), the city was taken and
the end of the Abbasids had come. An uncle of the
reigning Khalifa escaped and fled to Egypt, where
the Mamluk Sultan received him and gave him a
54 CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT
spiritual court and ecclesiastical recognition. He
found it good to have a Khalifa of his own to use
in any question of legitimacy. The name had yet
so much value. Finally, in 1517, the Mamluk rule
went down before the Ottoman Turks, and the story
told by them is that the last Abbasid, when he died
in 1538, gave over his rights to their Sultan, Sulay-
man the Great. Since then, the Ottoman Sultan of
Constantinople has claimed to be the Khalifa of
Muhammad and the spiritual head of the Muslim
world.
Such were the fates of the Commanders of the
Faithful. We have traced them through a long and
devious course, full of confusions and complications.
Leaving aside the legitimist party, the whole may be
summed in a word. The theoretical position was
that the Imam, or leader, must be elected by the
Muslim community, and that position has never, the
oretically, been abandoned. Each new Ottoman
sovereign is solemnly elected by the Ulama, or canon
lawyers and divines of Constantinople. His tem
poral sovereignty comes by blood ; in bestowing this
spiritual sovereignty the Ulama act as representatives
of the People of Muhammad. Thus the theoretical
position was liable to much modification in practice.
The Muslim community resolves itself into the people
of the capital ; still further, into the body-guard of
the dead Khalifa ; and, finally, as now, into the pe
culiar custodians of the Faith. Among the Ibadites
the position from the first seems to have been that
only those learned in the law should act as electors.
Along with this, the doctrine developed that it was
CONSTITUTIONAL QUESTION OF TO-DAY 55
the duty of the people to recognize un fait accompli
and to do homage to a successful usurper until
another more successful should appear. They had
learned that it was better to have a bad ruler than no
ruler at all. This was the end of the democracy of
Islam.
Finally, it may be well to give some account of the
constitutional question as it exists at the present day.
The greatest of the Sultans of Islam is undoubtedly
the Emperor of India. Under his rule are far more
Muslims than fall to any other. But the theory of
the Muslim State never contemplated the possibility
of Muslims living under the rule of an unbeliever.
For them, the world is divided into two parts, the
one is Dar al-Islam, abode of Islam ; and the other
is Dar al-harb, abode of war. In the end, Dar al-
harb must disappear into Dar al-Islam and the whole
world be Muslim. These names indicate with suf
ficient clearness what the Muslim attitude is toward
non-Muslims. It is still a moot point among canon
lawyers, however, whether Jihad, or holy war, may
be made, unprovoked, upon any Dar al-harb. One
thing is certain, there must be a reasonable prospect
of success to justify any such movement ; the lives of
Muslims must not be thrown away. Further, the
necessity of the case in India, especially has
brought up the doctrine that any country in which
the peculiar usages of Islam are protected and its
injunctions even some of them followed, must be
regarded as Dar al-Islam and that Jihad within its
borders is forbidden. We may doubt, however, if
this doctrine would hold back the Indian Muslims to
66 CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT
any extent if a good opportunity for a Jihad really
presented itself. The SJji ites, it may be remarked,
cannot enter upon a Jihad at all until the Hidden
Imam returns and leads their armies.
Again the two signs of sovereignty for Muslims are
that the name of the sovereign should be on the
coinage and that he should be prayed for in the Friday
sermon (khutba). In India, the custom seems to be to
pray for " the ruler of the age " without name ; then
each worshipper can apply it as he chooses. But
there has crept in a custom in a few mosques of pray
ing for the Ottoman Sultan as the Khalifa ; the Eng
lish government busies itself little with these things
until compelled, and the custom will doubtless spread.
The Ottoman Sultan is certainly next greatest to the
Emperor of India and would seem, as a Muslim ruling
Muslims, to have an unassailable position. But in
his case also difficult and ambiguous constitutional
questions can be raised. He has claimed the Khali-
fate, as we have seen, since 1538, but the claim is a
shaky one and brings awkward responsibilities. As
stated at the present day, it has five grounds. First,
de facto right; the Ottoman Sultan won his title by
the sword and holds it by the sword. Second, elec
tion ; this form has been already described. Third,
nomination by the last Abbasid Khalifa of Egypt ;
so Abu Bakr nominated Urnar to succeed him, and
precedent is everything in Islam. Fourth, possession
and guardianship of the two Hararns, or Sacred Cit
ies, Mecca and al-Madina. Fifth, possession of some
relics of the Prophet saved from the sack of Baghdad
and delivered to Sultan Salim, on his conquest of
t THEORIES OF THE KHALIFATE 57
Egypt, by the last Abbasid. But these all shatter
against the fixed fact that absolutely accepted tradi
tions from the Prophet assert that the Khalifa must
be of the family of Quraysh ; so long as there are
two left of that tribe, one must be Khalifa and the
other his helper. Still, here, as everywhere, the
principal of Ijma, Agreement of the Muslim peo
ple, (see p. 105) comes in and must be reckoned
with. These very traditions are probably an expres
sion in concrete form of popular agreement. The
Khalifate itself is confessedly based upon agreement.
The canon lawyers state the case thus : The Irnamites
and Isma ilians hold that the appointment of a leader
is incumbent upon God. There is only the difference
that the Imamites say that a leader is necessary in
order to maintain the laws unimpaired, while the
Isma ilians regard him as essential in order to give
instruction about God. The Kharijites, on the other
hand, recognize no fundamental need of an Imam ;
he is only allowable. Some of them held that he
should be appointed in time of public trouble to do
away with the trouble, thus a kind of dictator ; others,
in time of peace, because only then can the people
agree. The Mu tazilites and the Zaydites held that
it was for man to appoint, but that the necessity was
based on reason ; men needed such a leader. Yet
some Mu tazilites taught that the basis was partly
reason and partly obedience to tradition. On the
other hand, the Sunnites hold that the appointment
of an Imam is incumbent upon men and that the
basis is obedience to the tradition of the Agreement
of the Muslim world from the earliest times. The
58 CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT
community of Islam may have disputed over the in
dividual to be appointed, but they never doubted
that the maintenance of the faith in its purity re
quired a leader, and that it was, therefore, incumbent
on men to appoint one. The basis is Ijma, Agree
ment, not Scripture or tradition from Muhammad or
analogy based on these two.
It will be seen from this that the de facto ground
to the claim of the Ottoman Sultan is the best. The
Muslim community must have a leader ; this is the
greatest Muslim ruling Muslims ; he claims the lead
ership and holds it. If the English rule were to be
come Muslim, the Muslims would rally to it. The
ground of election amounts to nothing, the nomina
tion to little more, except for antiquarians ; the
possession of the Prophetic relics is a sentiment that
would have weight with the crowd only; no canon
lawyer would seriously urge it. The guardianship of
the two Harams is precarious. A Turkish reverse in
Syria would withdraw every Turkish soldier from
Arabia and the great Sharif families of Mecca, all of
the blood of the Prophet, would proclaim a Khalifa
from among themselves. At present, only the Turk
ish garrison holds them in check.
But a Khalifa has responsibilities. He absolutely
cannot become a constitutional monarch in our sense.
He rules under law divine law and the people can
depose him if he breaks it ; but he cannot set up
beside himself a constitutional assembly and give it
rights against himself. He is the successor of Mu
hammad and must rule, within limitations, as an ab
solute monarch. So impossible is the modern Khali-
PAN-ISLAMISM 59
fate, and so gigantic are its responsibilities. The
millions of Chinese Muslims look to him and all
Muslims of central Asia ; the Muslims of India who
are not Shi ite also look to him. So, too, in Africa
and wherever in the world the People of Muhammad
have gone, their eyes turn to the Bosphorus and the
Great Sultan. This is what has been called the
modern Pan-Islamic movement ; it is a modern fact.
The position of the other Muslim sects we have
already seen. Of Shi ite rulers, there are the Imam-
ites in Persia; scattered Zaydites still in south Arabia
and fugitive in Africa ; strange secret bodies of Isma-
ilians Druses, Nusayrites, Assassins still holding
their own in mountain recesses, forgotten by the
world ; oldest of all, the Sharif s of Morocco, who are
Sunnites and antedate all theological differences, hold
ing only by the blood of the Prophet. At Zanzibar,
Uman and the Mzab in Algeria are the descendants
of the Kharijites. Probably, somewhere or other,
there are some fossilized descendants of every sect
that has ever arisen, either to trouble the peace of
Islam or to save it from scholastic decrepitude and
death. Insurrections and heresies have their own
uses.
It only remains to make mention of two modern
movements which ha,ve deeply affected the Islam of
to-day. The Pan-Islamic movement, noticed above,
strives as much as anything to bring the Muslim
world into closer touch with the science and thought
of the Christian world, rallying all the Muslim peo
ples at the same time round the Ottoman Sultan as
their spiritual head and holding fast by the kernel of
60 CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT
Islam. It is a reform movement whose trend is for
ward. The other two, to which we now come, are
reform movements also, but their trend is backward.
They look to the good old days of early Islam and
try to restore them.
The first is that of the Wahhabites, so called from
Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (Slave of the Boun
tiful), its founder, a native of Najd in central Arabia,
who died in 1787. His aim was to bring Islam
back to its primitive purity and to do away with all
the usages and beliefs which had arisen to cloud its
absolute monotheism. /^But_,a.tteinp,ts at reformajjim
in Islam have never led to anything but the founding
of new dynasties./ They may begin with a saintly
reformer, but in the first or the second generation
there is sure to come the conquering disciple ; relig
ion and rule go together, and he who meddles with
the one must next grasp at the other. The third
stage is the extinction of the new dynasty and the
vanishing of its party into a more or less secret sect,
the vitality of which is again directed into religious
channels. The Wahhabites were no exception. /Their
rule extended from the Persian Gulf to the Eed Sea,
touched al-Yaman and Hadrarnawt and included some
districts of the Pashalik of Baghdad. That was early
in the nineteenth century ; but now, after many dy
nastic changes, the rule of the Wahhabites proper
has almost ceased, although the Turks have not
gained any new footing in Najd. There, a native
Arab dynasty has sprung up which is free from Turk
ish control in every respect, and has its seat in Ha il.
But the zeal of the Wahhabites gave an impulse to
BROTHERHOOD OF AS-SANUSI 61
reform in the general body of Muslims which is not
yet, by any means, extinct. Especially in India,
their views have been widely spread by missionaries,
and at one time there was grave fear of a Wahhabite
insurrection. But dead parties in Islam seldom rise
again, and the life of Wahhabism has passed into the
Muslim Church as a whole. /Politically it has failed,
but the spirit of reform remains and has undoubt
edly influenced the second reform movement, to which
we-rrow^eome. /
That is th ft "Rrnt.1i arli ft^fl pf as-Sanusi , founded in
1837 by Muhammad ibn Ali as-Sanusi in order to re
form and spread the faith. The tendency to organ
ize has always been strong among Orientals, and in
Islam itself there have risen, as we have seen, from
the earliest times, secret societies for conspiracy and
insurrection. But apart from these dubious organi
zations, religious feeling has also expressed itself in
brotherhoods closely corresponding to the monastic
orders of Europe, except that they were, and are,
self-governing and under no relations but those of
sentiment to the head of the Muslim Faith. Rather,
these orders of darwishes have been inclined toward
heresies of a mystical and pantheistic type more
than toward the development and support of the
severely scholastic theology of orthodox Islam. This
is a side of Muhammadanism with which we shall
have to deal in some detail hereafter. In the mean
time, it is enough to say that the Brotherhood of
as-Sanusi is one of the orders of darwishes, but
distinguished from all its predecessors in its severely
reforming and puritanic character. It has taken up
62 CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT
the task of the Wahhabites and is working out the
same problem in a rather different way. Its princi
ples are of the strictest monotheism ; all usages and
ideas that do not accord wffiTtneir "views of the exact
letter of the Qur an are prohibited. The present head
of the Brotherhood, the son of the founder, who him
self died in 1859, claims to be the Mahdi and has es
tablished a theocratic state at Jarabub, in the eastern
Sahara, between Egypt and Tripolis. The mother
house of the order is there, and from it missionaries
have gone out and established other houses through
out all north Africa and Morocco and far into the
interior. The Head himself has of late retreated
farther into the desert. There is also an important
centre at Mecca, where the pilgrims and the Bedawis
are initiated into the order in great numbers. From
Mecca these brethren return to their homes all over
the Muslim world, and the order is said to be especially
popular in the Malay Archipelago. So there has
sprung up in Islam, in tremendous ramifications, an
imperium in imperio. All the brethren in all the de
grees for, just as in the monastic orders of Europe,
there are active members and lay members reverence
and pay blind obedience to the Head in his inacces
sible oasis in the African desert. There he works
toward the end, and there can be little doubt what
that end will be. Sooner or later Europe in the
first instance, England in Egypt and France in
Algeria will have to face the bursting of this storm.
For this Mahdi is different from him of Khartum and
the southern Sudan in that he knows how to rule and
wait ; for years he has gathered arms and munitions,
THE PROBLEM OF THE FUTURE 63
and trained men for the great Jihad. When his plans
are ready and his time is come, a new chapter will be
opened in the history of Islam, a chapter which will
cast into forgetfulness even the recent volcanic out
burst in China. It will then be for the Ottoman
Sultan of the time to show what he and his Khalifate
are worth. He will have to decide whether he will
throw in his lot with a Mahdi of the old Islam and
the dream of a Muslim millennium, or boldly turn to
new things and carry the Successorship and the
People of Muhammad to join the civilized world.
PART II
BDetodopment of
CHAPTER I
The scope of jurisprudence among Muslims ; the earliest elements
in it, Arab custom, Jewish law, personality of Muhammad ;
his attitude toward law ; elements after death of Muhammad ;
Qur an, Usage of the Prophet, common law of al-Madina;
conception of Sunna before Muhammad and after ; traditions
and their transmission ; traditions in book form ; influence of
Umayyads ; forgery of traditions ; the Muwatta of Malik ibn
Anas ; the Musnad of Ahmad ibn Hanbal ; the musannafs ;
al-Bukhari; Muslim; Ibn Maja; at-Tirmidhi ; an-Nasa i; al-
Baghawi ; the problem of the Muslim lawyers ; their sources ;
Roman law ; the influence of the doctrine of the Responsa pru-
dentium ; Opinion in Islam ; the Law of Nature or Equity in
Islam; istihsan ; istislah ; Analogy; the patriarchal period in
Islam ; the Umayyad period ; the growth of the canon law.
IN tracing the development of Muslim jurispru
dence few of the difficulties are encountered which
surrounded Sir Henry Maine when he first examined
the origins and history of European law. We do not
need to push our researches back to the primitive
family, nor to work our way through periods of cen
turies guided by the merest fragments of documents
and hints of usage. Our subject was born in the
light of history ; it ran its course in a couple of hun
dred years and has left at every important point
65
66 DEVELOPMENT OF JURISPRUDENCE
authoritative evidences of its whence, its how, and its
whither. Our difficulties are different, but sufficiently
great. Shortly, they are two. The mass of material
is overpowering ; the strangeness of the ideas involved
is perplexing. The wealth of material will become
plain, to some extent at least, as the history is traced ;
but for the strangeness of the contents, of the ar
rangement and the atmosphere of these codes some
preparation must be given from the outset. How,
indeed, can we meet a legal code which knows no
distinction of personal or public, of civil or criminal
law ; which prescribes and describes the use of the
toothpick and decides when a wedding invitation may
be declined, which enters into the minutest and most
unsavory details of family life and lays down rules of
religious retreat ? Is it by some subtle connection of
thought that the chapter on oaths and vows follows
immediately that on horse-racing, and a section on
the building line on a street is inserted in a chapter
on bankruptcy and composition ? One thing, at least,
is abundantly clear. Muslim law, in the most abso
lute sense, fits the old definition, and is the science of
all things, human and divine. It tells what we must
render to Caesar and what to God, what to ourselves,
and what to our fellows. The bounds of the Platonic
definition of rendering to each man his due it utterly
shatters. While Muslim theology defines everything
that a man shall believe of things in heaven and in
earth and beneath the earth and this is no flat rhet
oric Muslim law prescribes everything that a man
shall do to God, to his neighbor, and to himself. It
takes all duty for its portion and defines all action in
SCOPE OF MUSLIM LAW 67
terms of duty. Nothing can escape the narrow meshes
of its net. One of the greatest legists of Islam never
ate a watermelon because he could not find that the
usage of the Prophet had laid down and sanctioned a
canonical method of doing so.
It will, therefore, be well for the student to work
through the sketch of a code of Muslim law which is
inserted in Appendix I. One has been chosen which
belongs to the school of ash- Shaft i because of its gen
eral accessibility. It should be remembered that
what is given is the merest table of contents. The
standard Arabic commentary on the book extends to
eight hundred and eleven closely printed quarto
pages. Even a mere reading of this table of contents,
however, will show in how different a sphere of thought
from ours Muslim law moves and lives. But we must
return to the beginning of things, to the egg from
which this tremendous system was hatched.
The mother-city of Islam was the little town of
Yathrib, called Madinat an-Nabi, the City of the
Prophet, or, shortly, al-Madina, ever since the Hijra
or Migration of Muhammad to it in the year 622 of
the Christian era. Here the first Muslim state was
founded, and the germinal principles of Muslim juris
prudence fixed. Both state and jurisprudence were
the result of the inter-working of the same highly
complicated causes. The ferments in the case may
be classified and described as follows : First, in the
town itself before the appearance of Muhammad on
its little stage little, but so momentous for the
future there were two parties, often at war, oftener
at peace. There was a genuine Arab element and
68 DEVELOPMENT OF JURISPRUDENCE
there was a large settlement of Jews. To the Arabs
any conception of law was utterly foreign. An Arab
tribe has no constitution ; its system is one of in
dividualism ; the single man is a sovereign and no
writ can lie against him ; the tribe can cast him forth
from its midst ; it cannot otherwise coerce him. So
stands the case now in the desert, and so it was then.
Some slight hold there might be on the tribe through
the fear of the tribal God, but on the individual Arab,
always a somewhat cynical sceptic, that hold was of
the slightest. Further, the avenging of a broken
oath was left to the God that had witnessed the oath ;
if he did not care to right his client, no one else would
interfere. There was customary law, undoubtedly,
but it was protected by no sanction and enforced by
no authority. If both parties chose to invoke it,
well; if not, neither had anything to fear but the
anger of his opponent. That law of custom we shall
find again appearing in the system of Islam, but there
it will be backed by the sanction of the wrath of God
working through the authority of the state. The Jew
ish element was in a different case. They may have
been Jewish immigrants, they may have been Jewish
proselytes many Arab tribes, we know, had gone
over bodily to Judaism but their lives were ruled
and guided by Jewish law. To the primitive and
divine legislation on Sinai there was an immense ac
cretion by legal fiction and by usage; the Koman
codes had left their mark and the customary law of
the desert as well. All this was working in the life
of the town when Muhammad and his little band of
fugitives from Mecca entered it. Being Meccans,
MUHAMMAD AS A LEGISLATOR 69
they must have brought with them the more devel
oped legal ideas of that trading centre; but these
were of comparatively little account in the scale. The
new and dominating element was the personality of
Muhammad himself. His contribution was legisla
tion pure and simple, the only legislation that has
ever been in Islam. Till his death, ten years later,
he ruled his community as an absolute monarch, as a
prophet in his own right. He sat in the gate and
judged the people. He had no need of a code, for
his own will was enough. He followed the custom
ary law of the town, as it has been described above,
when it suited him, and when he judged that it was
best. If not, he left it and there was a revelation.
So the legislative part of the Qur an grew out of such
scraps sent down out of heaven to meet the needs of
the squabbles and questions of the townsfolk of al-
Madina. The system was one of pure opportunism ;
but of what body of legislation can that not be said ?
Of course, on the one hand, not all decisions were
backed by a revelation, and Muhammad seems, on the
other, to have made a few attempts to deal system
atically with certain standing and constantly recur
ring problems such, for example, as the conflicting
claims of heirs in an estate, and the whole compli
cated question of divorce but in general, the position
holds that Muhammad as a lawyer lived from hand
to mouth. He did not draw up any twelve tables or
ten commandments, or code, or digest ; he was there
and the people could come and ask him questions
when they chose, and that was enough. The concep
tion of a rounded and complete system which will
70 DEVELOPMENT OF JURISPRUDENCE
meet any case and to which all cases must be ad
justed by legal fiction or equity, the conception
which we owe to the genius and experience of the
Roman lawyers, was foreign to his thought. From
time to time he got into difficulties. A revelation
proved too wide or too narrow, or left out some im
portant possibility. Then there came another to
supplement or correct, or even to set the first quite
aside Muhammad had no scruples about progressive
revelation as applied to himself. Thus, through these
interpretive acts, as we may call them, many flat con
tradictions have come into the Qur an and have proved
the delight of generations of Muslim jurisconsults.
Such, then, was the state of things legal in al-
Madina during the ten years of Muhammad s rule
there until his death in A.D. 632. Of law there was,
strictly speaking, none. In his decisions, Muham
mad could follow certainly the customary law of the
town ; but to do so there was no necessity upon him
other than prudence, for his authority was absolute.
Yet even with such authority and such freedom, his
task was a hard one. The Jews, the native Arabs of
al-Madina, and his fellow fugitives from Mecca lived
in more or less of friction. He had to see to it that his
decisions did not bring that friction to the point of
throwing the whole community into a flame. The
Jews, it is true, were soon eliminated, but the influ
ence of their law lasted in the customary law of the
town long after they themselves had become insig
nificant. Still, with all this, the suitor before Mu
hammad had no certainty on what basis his claims
would be judged ; whether it would be the old law of
QUK AN; USAGE OF MUHAMMAD 71
the town, or a rough equity based on Muhammad s
own ideas, or a special revelation ad hoc. So far,
then, we may be said to have the three elements
common law, equity, legislation. Legal fiction we
shall meet later ; Muhammad had no need of it.
But with the death of Muhammad in A.D. 632 the
situation was completely changed. We can now speak
of Muslim law ; legislation plays no longer any part ;
the process of collecting, arranging, correlating, and
developing has begun. Consider the situation as it
must have presented itself to one of the immediate
successors of Muhammad, as he sat in his place and
judged the people. When a case came up for deci
sion, there were several sources from which a law in
point might be drawn. First among them was the
Qur an. It had been collected from the fragmentary
state in which Muhammad had left it by Abu Bakr,
his first Khalifa, some two years after his death.
Again, some ten years later, it was revised and given
forth in a final public recension by Uthman, the third
Khalifa. This was the absolute word of God
thoughts and language and stood and, in theory,
still stands first of all sources for theology and law.
If it contained a law clearly applying to the case in
hand, there was no more to be said ; divine legisla
tion had settled the matter. If not, recourse was
next had to the decisions of the Prophet. Had a
similar one come before him, and how had he ruled?
If the memories of the Companions of the Prophet,
the Sahibs, could adduce nothing similar from one of
his decisions, then the judge had to look further for
an authority. But the decisions of Muhammad had
72 DEVELOPMENT OF JURISPRUDENCE
been many, the memories of his Companions were
capacious, and possessed further, as we must recog
nize with regret, a constructive power that helped
the early judges of Islam out of many close corners.
But if tradition even true or false finally failed, then
the judge fell back on the common law of al-Madina,
that customary law already mentioned. When that,
too, failed, the last recourse was had to the common-
sense of the judge roughly, what we would call
equity. At the beginning, therefore, of Muslim
law, it had the following sources legislation, the
usage of Muhammad, the usage of al-Madina,
equity. Naturally, as time went on and the figure of
the founder drew back and became more obscure
and more venerated, equity fell gradually into dis
use ; a closer search was made for decisions of that
founder which could in any way be pressed into ser
vice; a method of analogy, closely allied to legal
fiction, was built up to assist in this, and the devel
opment of Muslim jurisprudence as a system and a
science was fairly begun. Further, in later times, the
decisions of the first four Khalifas and the agree
ment (ijma) of the immediate Companions of Mu
hammad came to assume an importance only second
to that of Muhammad himself. Later still, as a re
sult of this, the opinion grew up that a general agree
ment of the jurisconsults of any particular time was
to be regarded as a legitimate source of law. But
we must return to consider our subject more broadly
and in another field.
The fact has already been brought out that the
sphere of law is much wider in Islam than it has ever
LEGAL CLASSES OF ACTIONS 73
been with us. By it all the minutest acts of a Mus
lim are guarded. Europe, also, passed through a
stage similar to this in its sumptuary laws ; and the
tendency toward inquisitorial legislation still exists
in America, but not even the most medievally mind
ed American Western State has ventured to put upon
its statute-book regulations as to the use of the tooth
pick and the wash-cloth. Thus, the Muslim concep
tion of law is so wide as to reach essential difference.
A Muslim is told by his code not only what is re
quired under penalty, but also what is either recom
mended or disliked though without reward or penalty
being involved. He may certainly consult his law
yer, to learn how near the wind he can sail without
unpleasant consequences; but he may also consult
him as his spiritual director with regard to the rela
tive praiseworthiness or blameworthiness of classes
of actions of which our law takes no cognizance. In
consequence, actions are divided by Muslim canon
lawyers (faqiJis) into five classes. First, necessary
(fard or wajib) ; a duty the omission of which is
punished, the doing rewarded. Secondly, recom
mended (mandub or mustahabb) ; the doing is re
warded, but the omission is not punished. Thirdly,
permitted (ja iz or mubali) ; legally indifferent.
Fourthly, disliked (makruli) ; disapproved by the
law, but not under penalty. Fifthly, forbidden (Jia-
ram) ; an action punishable by law. All this being
so, it will be easily understood that the record of the
manners and customs of the Prophet, of the little de
tails of his life and conversation, came to assume a
high importance. Much of that was too petty ever
74 DEVELOPMENT OF JURISPRUDENCE
to reach expression in the great digests of law ; not
even the most zealous fixer of life by rule and line
would condemn his fellow- religionist because he pre
ferred to carry a different kind of walking-stick from
that approved by the Prophet, or found it fitting to
arrange his hair in a different way. But still, all
pious Muslims paid attention to such things, and
fenced their lives about with the strictest Prophetic
precedent. In consequence of this, there early arose
in Islam a class of students who made it their busi
ness to investigate and hand down the minutest de
tails as to the habits of Muhammad. This was a
separate thing from the study of law, although fated
to be eventually connected with it. Even in the
time of the Jaliiliya the period before Islam, vari
ously explained as the ignorance or as the rudeness,
uncivilizedness it had been a fixed trait of the Arab
mind to hold closely to old paths. An inherent con
servatism canonized the sunna custom, usage of
the ancients ; any stepping aside from it was a bid l a
innovation and had to win its way by its merits,
in the teeth of strong prejudice. With the coming
of Muhammad and the preaching of Islam, this an
cestral sunna had in great part to yield. But the
temper of the Arab mind remained firm, and the
sunna of Muhammad took its place. Pious Muslims
did not say, " Such was the usage of our fathers,
and it is mine ; " but, " I follow the usage of the
Prophet of God." Then, just as the old sunna of
the heathen times had expressed itself through the
stories of great warriors, of their battles and loves ;
through anecdotes of wise men, and their keen and
SUNNA ; HADITH 75
eloquent words ; so it was with the surma of the one
man, Muhammad. What he said, and what he did ;
what he refrained from doing ; what he gave quasi-
approval to by silence ; all was passed on in rapidly
increasing, pregnant little narratives. First, his im
mediate Companions would note, either by commit
ting to memory or to a written record, his utterances
and table-talk generally. We have evidence of sev
eral such Boswells, who fixed his words as they fell.
Later, probably, would come notes of his doings and
his customs, and of all the little and great happen
ings of the town. Above all, a record was being
gathered of all the cases judged by him, and of his
decisions ; of all the answers which he gave to for
mal questions on religious life and faith. All this
was jotted down by the Companions on sahifas odd
sheets just as they had done in the Ignorance with
the proverbs of the wise and their dark sayings.
The records of sayings were called hadiths ; the rest,
as a whole, sunna custom, for its details was used
the plural, sunan customs. At first, each man had
his own collection in memory or in writing. Then,
after the death of the Prophet and when his first
Companions were dropping off, these collections
were passed on to others of the second generation.
And so the chain ran on and in time a tradition
came to consist formally of two things the text or
matter (main) so handed on, and the succession (is-
nad] over whose lips it had passed. A said, " There
narrated to me B, saying, There narrated to
me C, saying, " so far the isnad, until the last
link came, and the main, the Prophet of God said,
76 DEVELOPMENT OF JURISPRUDENCE
"Some of my injunctions abrogate others," or "The
Jann were created of a smokeless flame," or what
ever it might be. What has just been said suggests
that it was at first indifferent whether traditions were
preserved orally or in writing. That is true of the
first generation ; but it must be remembered at the
same time, that the actual passing on was oral ; the
writing merely aided the memory to hold that which
was already learned. But with time, and certainly
by the middle of the second century of the Hijra, two
opposing tendencies in this respect had developed.
Many continued to put their trust in the written
word, and even came to pass traditions on without
any oral communication. But for others there lay
grave dangers in this. One was evidently real. The
unhappy character of the Arabic script, especially
when written without diacritical points, often made
it hard, if not practically impossible, to understand
such short, contextless texts as the traditions. A
guide was necessary to show how the word should be
read, and how understood. At the present time a
European scholar will sometimes be helpless before
even a fully vocalized text, and must take refuge in
native commentaries or in that oral tradition, if it
still exists and he has access to it, which supplies at
least a third of the meaning of an Arabic book.
Strengthening this came theological reasons. The
words of the Prophet would be profaned if they were
in a book. Or, again, they would be too much hon
ored and the Qur an itself might be neglected.
This last fear has been justified to a certain extent
by the event. On these grounds, and many more,
TRADITIONS IN LITERATURE 77
the writing and transmitting in writing of traditions
came to be fiercely opposed ; and the opposition con
tinued, as a theological exercise, long after many
books of traditions were in existence, and after the
oral transmission had become the merest farce and
had even frankly dropped out.
It is to the formation of these books of traditions,
or, as we might say, traditions in literature, that we
must now turn. For long, the fragmentary sahifas
and private collections made by separate scholars for
their own use sufficed. Books dealing with law
(fiqli) were written before there were any in that
department of literature called hadith. The cause of
this is tolerably plain. Law and treatises of law
were a necessity for the public and thus were encour
aged by the state. The study of traditions, on the
other hand, was less essential and of a more personal
and private nature. Further, under the dynasty of
the Umayyads, who reigned from A.H. 41 to A.H. 132,
theological literature was little encouraged. They
were simple heathen in all but name, and belonged,
and recognized that they belonged, not to Islam but
to the Jahiliya. For reasons of state, they encouraged
and spread also freely forged and encouraged others
to forge such traditions as were favorable to their
plans and to their rule generally. This was neces
sary if they were to carry the body of the people with
them. But they regarded themselves as kings and
not as the heads of the Muslim people. This same
device has been used after them by all the contend
ing factions of Islam. Each party has sought sanc
tion for its views by representing them in traditions
78 DEVELOPMENT OF JURISPRUDENCE
from the Prophet, and the thing has gone so far that
on almost every disputed point there are absolutely
conflicting prophetic utterances in circulation. It
has even been held, and with some justification,
that the entire body of normative tradition at present
in existence was forged for a purpose. With this
attitude of the Umayyads we shall have to deal at
greater length later. It is sufficient now to note that
the first real appearance of haditli in literature was
in the Mmvatta of Malik ibn Anas who died in A.H.
179.
Yet even this appearance is not so much of hadith
for its own sake, as of usages bearing upon law and
of the law that can be drawn from these usages.
The book is a corpus iuris not a corpus traditionum.
Its object was not so much to separate from the mass
of traditions in circulation those which could be re
garded as sound of origin and to unite them in a
formal collection, as to build up a system of law
based partly on tradition. The previous works deal
ing with law proper had been of a speculative char
acter, had shown much subjective reliance on their
own opinion on the part of the writers and had
drawn little from the sacred usage of the Prophet
and quoted few of his traditional sayings. Against
that the book of Malik was a protest and formed a
link between such law books pure and the collections
of traditions pure with which we now come to deal.
To Malik the main, or text, of a tradition had been
the only thing of importance. To the isnad, or
chain of authority running back to the Prophet, he
had paid little attention. He, as we have seen, was
THE MUSNADS 79
a lawyer and gathered traditions, not for their own
sake but to use them in law. To others, the tradition
was the thing, and too much care could not be given
to its details and its authenticity. And the care was
really called for. With the course of time and the
growing demand, the supply of traditions had also
grown until there was no doubt in the mind of any
one that an enormous proportion were simple forger
ies. To weed out the sound ones, attention had to
be given to the isnad; the names upon it had to be
examined ; the fact of their having been in inter
course to be determined ; the possibility of the case
in general to be tested. Thus there were formed real
collections of supposedly sound traditions, which
were called Musnads, because each tradition was
musnad propped, supported against the Compan
ions from whom it proceeded. In accordance with
this also they were arranged according to the Com
panions. After the name of the Companion were
given all the traditions leading back to him. One of
the earliest and greatest of these books was the
Musnad of Ahmad ibn Hanbal, who died A.H. 241 ;
of him more hereafter. This book has been printed
recently at Cairo in six quarto volumes of 2,885
pages and is said to contain about thirty thousand
traditions going back to seven hundred Companions.
But another type of tradition-book was growing
up, less mechanical in arrangement. It is the Mus-
annaf, the arranged, classified and in it the tradi
tions are arranged in chapters according to their sub
ject matter. The first Musannafio make a permanent
mark was the Sahih sound of al-Bukhari, who
80 DEVELOPMENT OF JURISPRUDENCE
died in A. H. 257. It is still extant and is the most
respected of all the collections of traditions. The
principle of arrangement in it is legal ; that is, the
traditions are classified in these chapters so as to af
ford bases for a complete system of jurisprudence.
Al-Bukhari was a strong opponent of speculative law
and his book was thus a protest against a tendency
which, as we shall see later, was strong in his time.
Another point in which al-Bukhari made his influ
ence felt and with greater effect, was increased
severity in the testing of traditions. He established
very strict laws, though of a somewhat mechanical
kind, and was most scrupulous in applying them.
His book contains about seven thousand traditions,
and he chose those, so at least runs the story, out of
six hundred thousand which he found in circulation.
The rest were rejected as failing to meet his tests.
How far the forgery of traditions had gone may be
seen from the example of Ibn Abi Awja, who was exe
cuted in A.H. 155, and who confessed that he had him
self put into circulation four thousand that were false.
Another and a similar Sahih is that of Muslim, who
died in A.H. 261. He was not so markedly juristic
as al-Bukhari. His object was rather to purify the
mass of existing tradition from illegitimate accre
tions than to construct a basis for a complete law
code. He has prefixed a valuable introduction on the
science of tradition generally. In some slight details
his principle of criticism differed from that of al-
Bukhari.
These two collections, called the two Sahilis as-
Sahihan are technically j ami s, i.e. they contain all
THE SUNAN 81
the different classes of traditions, historical, ethical,
dogmatic and legal. They have also come to be, by
common agreement, the two most honored authorities
in the Muslim world. A believer finds it hard, if not
impossible, to reject a tradition that is found in
both.
But there are four other collections which are
called Sunan Usages and which stand only second
to the two Sahihs. These are by Ibn Maja (d. 303),
Abu Da ud as-Sijistani (d. 275), at-Tirmidhi (d. 279)
and an-Nasa i (d. 303). They deal almost entirely with
legal traditions, those that tell what is permitted and
what is forbidden, and do not convey information on
religious and theological subjects. They are also
much more lenient in their criticisms of dubious tra
ditions. To work exclusion with them, the rejection
needed to be tolerably unanimous. This was re
quired by their stand-point and endeavor, which was
to find a basis for all the minutest developments and
details of jurisprudence, civil and religious.
These six books, the two Sahihs and the four
Sunans, came to be regarded in time as the principal
and all-important sources for traditional science.
This had already come about by the end of the fifth
century, although even after that voices of uncer
tainty continued to make themselves heard. Ibn
Maja seems to have been the last to secure firm foot
ing, but even he is included by al-Baghawi (d. 516)
in his Masabih as-simna, an attempted epitome into
one book of what was valuable in all. Still, long
after that, Ibn Khaldun, the great historian (d. 808),
speaks of five fundamental works ; and others speak of
82 DEVELOPMENT OF JURISPRUDENCE
seven, adding the Muwatta of Malik to the six above.
Others, again, especially in the West, extended the
number of canonical works to ten, though with vary
ing members; but all these must be regarded as
more or less local, temporary, and individual eccen
tricities. The position of the six stands tolerably
firm.
So much it has been necessary to interpolate and
anticipate with regard to the students of tradition
whose interest lay in gathering up and preserving,
not in using and applying. From the earliest time,
then, there existed these two classes in the bosom of
Islam, students of tradition proper and of law proper.
For long they did not clash ; but a collision was in
evitable sooner or later.
Yet, if the circle of the Muslim horizon had not
widened beyond the little market-town of al-Madina,
that collision might have been long in coming. Its
immediate causes were from without, and are to be
found in the wave of conquest that carried Islam,
within the century, to Samarqand beyond the Oxus
and to Tours in central France. Consider what that
wave of conquest was and meant. Within fourteen
years of the Hijra, Damascus was taken, and within
seventeen years, all Syria and Mesopotamia. By the
year 21, the Muslims held Persia ; in 41 they were at
Herat, and in 56 they reached Samarqand. In the
West, Egypt was taken in the year 20 ; but the way
through northern Africa was long and hard. Car
thage did not fall till 74, but Spain was conquered
with the fall of Toledo in 93. It was in A.D. 732, the
year of the Hijra 114, that the wave at last was
KISE OF SPECULATIVE JURISPRUDENCE 83
turned and the mercy of Tours was wrought by
Charles the Hammer; but the Muslims still held
Narbonne and raided in Burgundy and the Dauphine.
The wealth that flowed into Arabia from these expe
ditions was enormous ; money and slaves and luxu
ries of every kind went far to transform the old life of
hardness and simplicity. Great estates grew up :
fortunes were made and lost ; the intricacies of the
Syrian and Persian civilizations overcame their con
querors. All this meant new legal conditions and
problems. The system that had sufficed to guard the
right to a few sheep or camels had to be transformed
before it would suffice to adjust the rights and claims
of a tribe of millionnaires. But it must not be
thought that these expeditions were only campaigns
of plunder. With the Muslim armies everywhere
went law and justice, such as it was. Jurists accom
panied each army and were settled in the great camp
cities which were built to hold the conquered lands.
Al-Basra and al-Kufa and Fustat, the parent of Cairo,
owe their origin to this, and it was in these new seats
of militant Islam that speculative jurisprudence arose
and moulded the Muslim system.
The early lawyers had much to do and much to
learn, and it is to their credit that they recognized
both necessities. Muslim law is no product of the
desert or of the mind of Muhammad, as some have
said ; but rather of the labor of these men, strug
gling with a gigantic problem. They might have
taken their task much more easily than they did ;
they might have lived as Muhammad had done, from
hand to mouth, and have concealed their own sloth
84 DEVELOPMENT OF JURISPRUDENCE
by force ami free invention of authorities. But they
recognized their responsibility to God and man and
the necessity of building up a stable and complete
means of rendering justice. These armies of Mus
lims, we must remember, were not like the hordes of
Attila or Chingis Khan, destroyers only. The lands
they conquered were put to hard tribute, but it was
under a reign of law. They recognized frankly that
it was for them that this mighty empire existed ; but
they recognized also that it could continue to exist
only with order and duty imposed upon all. They
saw, too, how deficient was their own knowledge and
learned willingly of the people among whom they had
come. And here, a second time, Roman law the
parent-law of the world made itself felt. There
were schools of that law in Syria at Cresarea and Bey-
rout, but we need not imagine that the Muslim jurists
studied there. Rather, it was the practical school of
the courts as they actually existed which they at
tended. These courts were permitted to continue in
existence till Islam had learned from them all that
was needed. "We can still recognize certain princi
ples that were so carried over. That the duty of
proof lies upon the plaintiff, and the right of defend
ing himself with an oath upon the defendant ; the
doctrine of invariable custom and that of the differ
ent kinds of legal presumption. These, as expressed
in Arabic, are almost verbal renderings of the preg
nant utterances of Latin law.
But most important of all was a liberty suggested
by that system to the Muslim jurisconsults. This was
through the part played in the older school by the
KESPONSA PRUDENTIUM ; OPINION 85
Responsa Prudentium, answers by promiDent lawyers
to questions put to them by their clients, in which the
older law of the Twelve Tables was expounded, ex
panded, and often practically set aside by their com
ments. Sir Henry Maine thus states the situation :
"The authors of the new jurisprudence, during the
whole progress of its formation, professed the most
sedulous respect for the letter of the code. They were
merely explaining it, deciphering it, bringing out its
full meaning ; but then, in the result, by placing texts
together, by adjusting the law to states of fact which
actually presented themselves, and by speculating on
its possible application to others which might occur,
by introducing principles of interpretation derived
from the exegesis of other written documents which
fell under their observation, they educed a vast vari
ety of canons which had never been dreamt of by the
compilers of the Twelve Tables, and which were in
truth rarely or never to be found there." All this
precisely applies to the development of law in Islam.
The part of the Twelve Tables was taken by the
statute law of the Qur an and the case law derived
from the Usage of Muhammad ; that of the Roman
lurisprudentes by those speculative jurists who worked
mostly outside of al-Madina in the camp cities of
Mesopotamia and Syria the very name for lawyer in
Arabic, faqih, plural fuqaha, is a translation of pru-
dens, prudentes ; and that of the Responsa, the an
swers, by the " Opinion " which they claimed as a
legitimate legal method and source. Further, the
validity of a general agreement of jurisconsults " re
minds us of the rescript of Hadrian, which ordains
86 DEVELOPMENT OF JURISPRUDENCE
that, if the opinions of the licensed prudentes all
agreed, such common opinion had the force of stat
ute; but if they disagreed, the judge might follow
which he chose." The Arabic term, rciy, here ren
dered Opinion, has passed through marked vicissi
tudes of usage. In old Arabic, before it, in the view of
some, began to keep bad company, it meant an opin
ion that was thoughtful, weighed and reasonable, as
opposed to a hasty dictate of ill-regulated passion.
In that sense it is used in a tradition probably
forged handed down from Muhammad. He was
sending a judge to take charge of legal affairs in
al-Yaman, and asked him on what he would base his
legal decisions. " On the Qur an," he replied. " But
if that contains nothing to the purpose?" "Then
upon your usage." "But if that also fails you? *
" Then I will follow my own opinion." And the
Prophet approved his purpose. A similar tradition
goes back to Umar, the first Khalifa, and it, too, is
probably a later forgery, written to defend this source
of law. But, with the revolt against the use of Opin
ion, to which we shall soon come, the term itself fell
into grave disrepute and came to signify an unfounded
conclusion. In its extremest development it went
beyond the Responsa, which professed always to be
in exact accord with the letter of the older law, and
attained to be Equity in the strict sense ; that is, the
rejection of the letter of the law for a view supposed
to be more in accordance with the spirit of justice
itself. Thus, Equity, in the English sense, is the
law administered by the Court of Chancery and
claims, in the words again of Sir Henry Maine, to
EQUITi; LEGAL FICTION 87
" override the older jurisprudence of the country on
the strength of an intrinsic ethical superiority." In
Roman law, as introduced by the edict of the Praetor,
it was the law of Nature, "the part of law which
natural reason appoints for all mankind. " This is
represented in Islam under two forms, covered by
two technical terms. The one is that the legist, in
spite of the fact that the analogy of the fixed code
clearly points to one course, " considers it better "
(istihsan) to follow a different one ; and the other is
that, under the same conditions, he chooses a free
course " for the sake of general benefit to the com
munity " (islidali). Further scope of Equity Muslim
law never reached, and the legitimacy of these two
developments was, as we shall see, bitterly contested.
The freedom of opinion, with its possibility of a sys
tem of Equity, had eventually to be given up, and all
that was left in its place was a permissibility of an
alogical deduction (qiyas), the nearest thing to which
in Western law is Legal Fiction. In a word, the
possibility of development by Equity was lost, and
Legal Fiction entered in its place. But this antici
pates, and we must return to the strictly historical
movement.
During the first thirty years after the death of
Muhammad the period covered by the reigns of the
four theocratic rulers whom Islam still calls "the
Four Just, or Eightly Guided Khalifas " (al-Kliulafa
ar-rashidun) the two twin studies of tradition
(hadith) and of law (fiqh) were fostered and encour
aged by the state. The centre of that state was still
in al-Madina, on ground sacred with the memories of
88 DEVELOPMENT OF JURISPRUDENCE
the Prophet, amid the scenes where he had himself
been lord and judge, and under the conditions in
which his life as ruler had been cast. All the sources,
except that of divine revelation, which had been
open to him, were open to his successors and they
made full use of all. Bound that mother-hearth of
Islam was still gathered the great body of the im
mediate Companions of Muhammad, and they formed
a deliberative or consulting council to aid the Khalifa
in his task. The gathering of tradition and the de
veloping of law were vital functions ; they were the
basis of the public life of the state. This patriarchal
period in Muslim history is the golden age of Islam.
It ended with the death of Ali, in the year 40 of the
Hijra, and the succession of Mu awiya in the follow
ing year. " For thirty years," runs a tradition from
the Prophet, "my People will tread in my Path
(sunna) ; then will come kings and princes."
And so it was ; Mu awiya was the first of the Umay-
yad dynasty and with him and them Islam, in all
but the name, was at an end. He and they were Arab
kings of the old type that had reigned before Muham
mad at al-Hira and Ghassan, whose will had been their
law. The capital of the new kingdom was Damascus ;
al-Madina became a place of refuge, a Cave of Adul-
lam, for the old Muslim party. There they might
spin theories of state and of law, and lament the
good old days ; so long as there was no rebellion, the
Umayyads cared little for those things or for the men
who dreamt them. Once, the Umayyads were driven
to capture and sack the holy city, a horror in Islam
to this day. After that there was peace, the peace
GROWTH OF CANON LAW 89
of the accomplished fact. This is the genuinely
Arab period in the history of Islam. It is a period
full of color and light and life ; of love and song,
battle and feasting. Thought was free and conduct
too. The great theologian of the Greek Church, John
of Damascus, held high office at the Umayyad court,
and al-Akhtal, a Christian at least in name, was their
poet laureate. It is true that the stated services of
religion were kept up and on every Friday the Khali
fa had to entertain the people by a display of elo
quence and wit in the weekly sermon. But the old
world was dead and the days of its unity would never
come again. So all knew, except the irreconcilable
party, the last of the true Muslims who still haunted
the sacred soil of al-Madina and labored in the old
paths. They gathered the traditions of the Prophet ;
they regulated their lives more and more strictly by
his usage ; they gave ghostly council to the pious
who sought their help ; they labored to build up
elaborate systems of law. But it was all elaboration
and hypothetical purely. There was in it no vitaliz
ing force from practical life.
From this time on Muslim law has been more or
less in the position held by the canon law of the
Roman Church in a country that will not recognize it
yet dares not utterly reject it. The Umayyads were
statesmen and opportunists ; they lived, in legal
things, as much from hand to mouth as Muhammad
had done. He cut all knots with divine legislation ;
they cut them with the edge of their will. Under
them, as under him, a system of law was impossible.
But at the same time, in quiet and in secret, this
90 DEVELOPMENT OF JURISPKUDENCE
canon law of Islam was slowly growing up, slowly
rounding into full perfection of detailed correlation.
It was governing absolutely the private lives of all
the good Muslims that were left, and even the godless
Umayyads, as they had to preach on Fridays to the
People of Muhammad, so they had to deal with it
cautiously and respectfully. Of the names and lives
of these obscure jurists little has reached us and it is
needless to give that little here. Only with the final
fall of the Umayyads, in the year of the Hijra 132,
do we come into the light and see the different schools
forming under clear and definite leaders.
CHAPTEK II
The Abbasid revolution ; the compromise ; the problem of the Ab-
basids ; the two classes of canon lawyers and theologians ; the
rise of legal schools ; Abu Hanifa; his application of Legal
Fiction ; istihsan : the Qadi Abu Yusuf ; Muhammad ibn al-
Hasan ; Sufyan ath-Thawri ; al-Awza i ; Malik ibn Anas ; the
Usage of al-Madina ; istislah ; the doctrine of Agreement ; the
beginning of controversy ; traditionalists or historical lawyers
versus rationalists or philosophical lawyers; ash-Shafi i, a
mediator and systematizer ; the Agreement of the Muslim
people a formal source; " My People will never agree in an
error;" the resultant four sources, Qur an, Usage, Analogy,
Agreement ; the traditionalist revolt ; Da ud az-Zahiri and
literalism ; Ahmad ibn Hanbal ; the four abiding schools ; the
Agreement of Islam ; the Disagreement of Islam ; iurare in
verba magistri ; the degrees of authority ; the canon and the
civil codes in Islam ; their respective spheres ; distribution of
schools at present day ; Shi ite law ; Ibadite law.
THAT great revolution which brought the Abbasid
dynasty to power seemed at first to the pious theo
logians and lawyers to be a return of the old days.
They dreamt of entering again into their rights ; that
the canon law would be the full law of the land. It
was only slowly that their eyes were opened, and
many gave up the vain contest and contented them
selves with compromise. This had been rare under
the Umayyads ; the one or two canon lawyers who
had thrown in their lot with them had been marked
men. Az-Zuhri (d. 124), a man of the highest moral
and theological reputation who played a very im-
91
92 DEVELOPMENT OF JURISPRUDENCE
portant part in the first codifying of traditions, was
one of these, and the later pious historians have had
hard work to smooth over his connection with the
impious Umayyads. Probably it may be well to
say here the stories against the Umayyads have been
much heightened in color by their later tellers
and also az-Zuhri, being a man of insight and states
manship, may have recognized that their rule was the
best chance for peace in the country. Muslims have
come generally to accept the position that unbelief
on the part of the government, if the government is
strong and just, is better than true belief and anarchy.
This has found expression, as all such things do, in
traditions put in the mouth of the Prophet.
But while only a few canonists had taken the part
of the Umayyads, far more accepted the favors of the
Abbasids, took office under them and worked in their
cause. The Abbasids, too, had need of such men. It
was practically the religious sentiment of the people
that had overthrown the Umayyads and raised them
to power; and that religious sentiment, though it
could never be fully satisfied, must yet be respected
and, more important still, used. There is a striking
parallel between the situation then, and that of Scot
land at the Revolution Settlement of 1688. The
power of the Stuarts that is, of the worldly Umay
yads had been overthrown. The oppressed Church
of the Covenant that is, the old Muslim party had
been freed. The state was to be settled upon a new
basis. What was that basis to be ? The Covenant
ing party demanded the recognition of the Headship
of Christ that the Kirk should rule the state, or
THE PROBLEM OF THE ABBASIDS 93
should be the state, and that all other religious views
should be put under penalty. The old Muslim party
looked for similar things. That religious life should
be purified ; that the canon law should be again the
law of the state ; that the constitution of Umar should
berestored. How the Covenanters were disappointed,
how much they got and how much they failed to get,
needs no telling here.
Exactly in the same way it befell the old Muslims.
The theological reformation was sweeping and com
plete. The first Abbasids were pious, at least out
wardly; the state was put upon a pious footing.
The canon law also was formally restored, but with
large practical modifications. Canon lawyers were
received into the service of the state, provided they
were adaptable enough. Impossible men had no
place under the Abbasids ; their officials must be
pliable and dexterous, for a new modus Vivendi was
to be found. The rough and ready Umayyad cut
ting of the knot had failed ; the turn had now come
for piety and dexterity in twisting law. The court
lawyers learned to drive a coach and four through
any of the old statutes, and found their fortunes in
their brains. So the issue was bridged. But a large
party of malcontents was left, and from this time on
in Islam the lawyers and the theologians have di
vided into two classes, the one admitting, as a mat
ter of expediency, the authority of the powers of the
time and aiding them in their task as rulers ; the
other, irreconcilable and unreconciled, denouncing
the state as sunk in unbelief and deadly sin and its
lawyers as traitors to the cause of religion. To pur-
94 DEVELOPMENT OF JURISPKUDENCE
sue our parallel, they are represented in Scotland by
a handful of Covenanting congregations and in Amer
ica by the much more numerous and powerful Re
formed Presbyterian Church.
It is a significant fact that with the lifting of the
Umayyad pressure and the encouragement of legal
studies such as it was by the Abbasids, definite
and recognized schools of law began to form. What
had so long been in process in secret became public,
and its results crystallized under certain prominent
teachers. We will now take up these schools in the
order of the death dates of their founders ; we will
establish their principles and trace their histories.
We shall find the same conceptions recurring again
and again which have already been brought out,
Qur au, tradition (hadith), agreement (ijma), opinion
(rtfy), analogy (qiyas), local usage (urf), preference
(istihsan), in the teeth of the written law till at length,
when the battle is over, the sources will have limited
themselves to the four which have survived to the
present day Qur an, tradition, agreement, analogy.
And, similarly, of the six schools to be mentioned,
four only will remain to the present time, but these
of equal rank and validity in the eyes of the Believ
ers.
The Abbasids came to power in the year of the
Hijra 132, and in 150 died Abu Hanifa, the first
student and teacher to leave behind him a systematic
body of teaching and a missionary school of pupils.
He was a Persian by race, and perhaps the most dis
tinguished example of the rule that Muslim scientists
and thinkers might write in Arabic but were seldom
ABU TIANIFA 95
of Arab blood. He does not seem to have held office
as a judge or to have practised law at all. He was,
rather, an academic student, a speculative or philo
sophical jurist we might call him. His system of
law, therefore, was not based upon the exigencies of
experience ; it did not arise from an attempt to meet
actual cases. We might say of it, rather, but in a
good sense, that it was a system of casuistry, an at
tempt to build up on scientific principles a set of
rules which would answer every conceivable question
of law. In the hands of some of his pupils, when
applied to actual facts, it tended to develop into casu
istry in a bad sense ; but no charge of perverting
justice for his own advantage seems to have been
brought against Abu Hanifa himself. His chief in
struments in constructing his system were opinion
and analogy. He leaned little upon traditions of
the usage of Muhammad, but preferred to take the
Qur anic texts and develop from them his details. But
the doing of this compelled him to modify simple
opinion equivalent to equity as we have seen and
limit it to analogy of some written statute (nass). He
could hardly forsake a plain res iudicata of Muham
mad, and follow his own otherwise unsupported views,
but he might choose to do so if he could base it on
analogy from the Qur an. Thus, he came to use what
was practically legal fiction. It is the application
of an old law in some sense or way that was never
dreamt of by the first imposer of the law, and which
may, in fact, run directly counter to the purpose of
the law. The fiction is that it is the original law that
is being observed, while, as a matter of fact, there
96 DEVELOPMENT OF JURISPRUDENCE
has come in its place an entirely different law. So
Abu Hanifa would contend that he was following the
divine legislation of the Qur an, while his adversaries
contended that he was only following his own opinion.
But if, on the one hand, he was thus limited from
equity to legal fiction, on another he developed a
new principle of even greater freedom. Reference
has already been made to the changes which were
of necessity involved in the new conditions of the
countries conquered by the Muslims. Often the law
of the desert not only failed to apply to town and
agricultural life ; it was even directly mischievous.
On account of this, a consideration of local conditions
was early accepted as a principle, but in general
terms. These were reduced to definiteness by Abu
Hanifa under the formula of "holding for better"
(istihsan). He would say, "The analogy in the case
points to such and such a rule, but under the circum
stances I hold it for better to rule thus and thus."
This method, as we shall see later, was vehemently
attacked by his opponents, as was his system in gen
eral. Yet that system by its philosophical perfection
due to its theoretical origin and perfection in
detail due to generations of practical workers has
survived all attack and can now be said to be the
leading one of the four existing schools. No legal
writings of Abu Hanifa have reached us, nor does he
seem to have, himself, cast his system into a finished
code. That was done by his immediate pupils, and
especially by two, the Qadi Abu Yusuf, who died in
182, and Muhammad ibn al-Hasan, who died in 189.
The first was consulting lawyer and chief Qadi to the
THE QADI AF,U YUSTJF 97
great Khalifa Harun ar-Rashid, and, if stories can be
believed, proved himself as complaisant of conscience
as a court casuist need be. Innumerable are the
tales afloat of his minute knowledge of legal subtleties
and his fertility of device in applying them to meet
the whims of his master, Harun. Some of them have
found a resting place in that great mirror of mediaeval
Muslim life, The Thousand and One Nights ; reference
may be made to Night 296. Through his influence,
the school of Abu Hanifa gained an official impor
tance which it never thereafter lost. He wrote for
Harun a book which we have still, on the canon law
as applied to the revenues of the state, a thorny and al
most impossible subject, for the canon law makes really
no provision for the necessary funds of even a simple
form of government and much less for such an array
of palaces and officials as had grown up around the
Abbasids. His book is marked by great piety in ex
pression and by ability of the highest kind in recon
ciling the irreconcilable.
But all the canon lawyers did not fall in so easily
with the new ways. Many found that only in ascet
icism, in renunciation of the world and engaging in
pious exercises was there any chance of their main
taining the old standards in a state that was for
them based on oppression and robbery. One of
these was Sufyan ath-Thawri, a lawyer of high re
pute, who narrowly missed founding a separate school
of law and who died in 161. There has come down
to us a correspondence between him and Harun,
which, though it cannot possibly be genuine, throws
much light on the disappointment of the sincerely
98 DEVELOPMENT OF JURISPRUDENCE
religious section. Harun writes on his accession to
the Khalifate (170), complaining that Suf jan had not
visited him, in spite of their bond of brotherhood,
and offering him wealth from the public treasury.
Sufyan replied, denouncing such use of public funds
and all the other uses of them by Harun many
enough except those precisely laid down in the
codes. On the basis of these, Harun would have had
to work for his own living. There are also other
denunciations for crimes in the ruler which he pun
ished in others. Harun is said to have kept the letter
and wept over it at intervals, but no change of life on
his part is recorded. Apparently, with the accession
of the Abbasids ascetic and mystical Islam made a
great development. It became plain to the pious
that no man could inherit both this world and the
next.
While Abu Hanifa was developing his system in
Mesopotamia, al-Awza i was working similarly in
Syria. He was born at Baalbec, lived at Damascus,
and at Beyrout where he died in 157. Of him and
his teaching we know comparatively little. But so
far it is clear that he was not a speculative jurist of
the same type as Abu Hanifa, but paid especial at
tention to traditions. At one time his school was
followed by the Muslims of Syria and the entire
West to Morocco and Spain. But its day was a short
one. The school of Abu Hanifa, championed by Abu
Yusuf with his tremendous influence as chief Qadi
of the Abbasid empire, pushed it aside, and at the
present day it has no place except in history. For
us, its interest is that of another witness to the early
MALIK IBN ANAS 99
rise and spread of systems of jurisprudence outside
of Arabia.
In A.H. 179, three years before the death of Abu
Yusuf and twenty-nine after that of Abu Hanifa,
there died at al-Madina the founder and head of
an independent school of a very different type. This
was Malik ibn Anas, under whose hands what we may
call, for distinction, the historical school of al-Ma
dina took form. Al-Madina, it will be remembered,
was the mother-city of Muslim law. It was the
special home of the traditions of the Prophet and the
scene of his legislative and judicial life. Its pre-
Islamic customary law had been sanctioned, in a
sense, by his use. It had been the capital of the
state in its purest days. From the height of all these
privileges its traditionists and lawyers looked down
upon the outsiders and parvenus who had begun to
intermeddle in sacred things.
But it must not be thought that this school was of
a rigid traditionism. The case was quite the reverse,
and in many respects it is hard to make a distinction
between it and that of Abu Hanifa. Its first source
was, of necessity, the Qur an. Then came the usage of
the Prophet. This merged into the usage of the Suc
cessors of the Prophet and the unwritten custom of
the town. It will be seen that here the historical
weight of the place came to bear. No other place, no
other community, could furnish that later tradition
with anything like the same authority. Further, Malik
ibn Anas was a practical jurist, a working judge. He
was occupied in meeting real cases from day to day.
When he sat in public and judged the people, or
100 DEVELOPMENT OF JURISPRUDENCE
with his pupils around him and expounded and de
veloped the law, he could look back upon a line of
canon lawyers who had sat in his place and done
as he was doing. In that lies the great difference.
He was in practical touch with actual life ; that was
one point ; and, secondly, he was in the direct line
of the apostolic succession, and in the precise en
vironment of the Prophet. So when he went beyond
Qur an, prophetic usage, agreement, and gave out
decisions on simple opinion, the feeling of the com
munity justified him. It was a different thing for
Malik ibn Anas, sitting there in state in al-Madina,
to use his judgment, than for some quick-brained
vagabond of a Persian or Syrian proselyte, some
pauvre diable with neither kith nor kin in the coun
try, to lay down principles of law. So the pride of
the city of the Prophet distinguished between him and
Abu Hanifa.
But though the speculative element in the school
of Malik, apart from its local and historical environ
ment, which gave it unifying weight, was essentially
the same as in the school of Abu Hanifa, yet it is
true that at al-Madina it played a less important
part. Malik used tradition more copiously and took
refuge in opinion less frequently. Without opinion,
he could not have built his system ; but for him it
was not so much a primary principle as a means
of escape. Yet one principle of great freedom he
did derive from it and lay down with clearness ; it
is the conception of the public advantage (istisldh).
When a rule would work general injury it is to be
set aside even in the teeth of a valid analogy. This,
THE DOCTRINE OF AGREEMENT 101
it will be seen, is nearly the same as the preference
of Abu Hanifa. The technical term istislah, chosen
by Malik to express his idea, was probably intended
to distinguish it from that of Abu Hanifa, and also
to suggest in the public advantage (maslaha) a more
valid basis than the mere preference of the legist.
Another conception which Malik and his school
developed into greater exactitude and force was that
of the agreement (ijma). It will be remembered that
from the death of Muhammad all the surviving Com
panions resident in al-Madina formed a kind of con-
sultive council to aid the Khalifa with their store of
tradition and experience. Their agreement on any
point was final ; it was the voice of the Church. This
doctrine of the infallibility of the body of the be
lievers developed in Islam until at its widest it
was practically the same as the canon of catholic
truth formulated by Vincent of Lerins, Quod ubique,
quod semper, quod ab omnibus. But Malik, according
to the usual view, had no intention of granting any
such deciding power to the outside world. The world
for him was al-Madina and the agreement of al-
Madina established catholic verity. Yet there are
narratives which suggest that he approved the agree
ment and local usage of al-Madina for al-Madina be
cause they suited al-Madina. Other places might
also have their local usages which suited them better.
In the next school we shall find the principle of
agreement put upon a broader basis and granted
greater weight. Finally, Malik is the first founder
of a system from whom a law book, the Muivatta
mentioned above, has come down to us. It is not
102 DEVELOPMENT OF JURISPRUDENCE
iii the exact sense, a manual or code ; rather a col
lection of materials for a code with remarks by the
collector. He gives the traditions which seem to him
of juristic importance about seventeen hundred in
all arranged according to subject, and follows up
each section, when necessary, with remarks upon the
usage of al-Madina, and upon his own view of the
matter. When he cannot find either tradition or
usage, he evidently feels himself of sufficient author
ity to follow his own opinion, and lay down on that
basis a binding rule. This, however, as we have
seen, is very different from allowing other people,
outsiders to al-Madina, to do the same thing. The
school founded by Malik ibn Anas on these principles
is one of the surviving four. As that of Abu Hanifa
spread eastward, so that of Malik spread westward,
and for a time crushed out all others. The firm grip
which it has especially gained in western North
Africa may be due to the influence of the Idrisids
whose founder had to flee from al-Madina when
Malik was in the height of his reputation there, and
also to hatred of the Abbasids who championed the
school of Abu Hanifa.
But now we pass from simple development to
development through conflict. Open conflict, so far
as there had been any, had covered points of detail ;
for example, the kind of opinion professed by Abu
Hanifa, on the one hand, and by Malik, on the other.
One of the chiefest of the pupils of Abu Hanifa, the
Muhammad ibu al-Hasan already mentioned, spent
three years in study with Malik at al-Madina and
found no difficulty in thus combining his schools.
HISTORICAL V. PHILOSOPHICAL LAWYERS 103
The conflict of the future was to be different and to
touch the very basis of things. The muttering of
the coming storm had been heard for long, but it
was now to burst. Exact dates we cannot give, but
the reaction must have been progressing in the latter
part of the life of Malik ibn Anas.
The distinction drawn above between traditionists
and lawyers will be remembered, and the promise of
future collision which always has come between his
torical or empirical, and speculative or philosophical
students of systems of jurisprudence. The one side
points to the absurdities, crudities, and inadequacies
of a system based upon tradition and developing by
usage ; the other says that we are not wise enough
to rewrite the laws of our ancestors. These urge a
necessity ; those retort an inability. Add to this a
belief on the part of the traditionists that they were
defending a divine institution and the situation is
complete as it now lay in Islam. The extreme right
said that law should be based on Qur an and tradition
only; the extreme left, that it was better to leave
untrustworthy and obscure traditions and work out a
system of rules by logic and the necessities of the
case. To and fro between these two extremes swayed
the conflict to which we now come.
In that conflict three names stand out : ash-Shafi i
who died in 204, Ahmad ibn Haubal who died in 241
and Da ud az-Zahiri who died in 270. Strangely
enough, the first of these, ash-Shafi i, struck the
mediating note and the other two diverged further
and further from the via media thus shown toward
a blank traditiouism.
104 DEVELOPMENT OF JURISPRUDENCE
Ash-Shafi i is without question one of the greatest
figures in the history of law. Perhaps he had not
the originality and keenness of Abu Hanifa ; but he
had a balance of mind and temper, a clear vision and
full grasp of means and ends that enabled him to say
what proved to be the last word in the matter. After
him came attempts to tear down ; but they failed.
The fabric of the Muslim canon law stood firm. There
is a tradition from the Prophet that he promised that
with the end of every century would come a restorer
of the faith of his people. At the end of the first
century was the pious Khalifa, Umar ibn Abd al-
Aziz, who by some accident strayed in among the
Umayyads. At the end of the second came ash-
Shafi i. His work was to mediate and systematize
and bore especially on the sources from which rules
of law might be drawn. His position on the positive
side may be stated as one of great reverence for
tradition. "If you ever find a tradition from the
Prophet saying one thing," he is reported to have
said, " and a decision from me saying another thing,
follow the tradition." An absolutely authentic ac
cording to Muslim rules of evidence and clear tra
dition from the Prophet he regarded as of equally
divine authority with a passage in the Qur an. Both
were inspired utterances, if slightly different in form ;
the Qur an was verbally inspired; such traditions
were inspired as to their content. And if such a
tradition contradicted a Qur anic passage and came
after it in time, then the written law of the Qur an
was abrogated by the oral law of the tradition. But
this involved grave difficulties. The speculative ju-
AGREEMENT AS A SOURCE 105
rists had defended their position from the beginning
by pointing to the many contradictory traditions
which were afloat, and asking how the house of tradi
tion could stand when so divided against itself. A
means of reconciling traditions had to be found, and
to this ash-Shafi i gave himself. We need not go
over his methods here ; they were the same that have
always been used in such emergencies. The worship
of the letter led to the straining of the letter, and to
explaining away of the letter.
But there lay a rock in his course more dangerous
than any mere contradiction in differing traditions.
Usages had grown up and taken fast hold which were
in the teeth of all traditions. These usages were in
the individual life, in the constitution of the state,
and in the rules and decisions of the law courts. The
pious theologian and lawyer might rage against them
as he chose ; they were there, firmly rooted, immovable.
They were not arbitrary changes, but had come about
in the process of time through the revolutions of
circumstances and varying conditions. Ash-Shafi i
showed his greatness by recognizing the inevitable
and providing a remedy. This lay in an extension of
the principle of agreement and the erection of it into
a formal source. Whatever the community of Islam
has agreed upon at any time, is of God. We have
met this principle before, but never couched in so ab
solute and catholic a form. The agreement of the
immediate Companions of Muhammad had weight
with his first Successors. The agreement of these
first Companions and of the first generation after
them, had determining weight in the early church.
106 DEVELOPMENT OF JURISPRUDENCE
The agreement of al-Madina had weight with Malik
ibn Anas. The agreement of many divines and le
gists always had weight of a kind. Among lawyers,
a principle, to the contrary of which the memory of
man ran not, had been determining. But this was
wider, and from this time on the unity of Islam was
assured. The evident voice of the People of Muham
mad was to be the voice of God. Yet this principle,
if full of hope and value for the future, involved the
canonists of the time in no small difficulties. Was it
conceivable that the agreement could override the
usage of the Prophet ? Evidently not. There must,
then, they argued, once have existed some tradition
to the same effect as the agreement, although it had
now been lost. Some such lost authority must be
presupposed. This can remind us of nothing so
much as of the theory of the inerrant but lost original
of the Scriptures. And it had the fate of that theory.
The weight of necessity forced aside any such trifling
and the position was frankly admitted that the agree
ment of the community was a safer and more certain
basis than traditions from the Prophet. Traditions
were alleged to that effect. " My People will never
agree in an error," declared Muhammad, or, at least,
the later church made him so declare.
But ash-Shafi i found that even the addition of
agreement to Qur an and Prophetic usage did not
give him basis enough for his system. Opinion he
utterly rejected ; the preference of Abu Hanifa and
the conception of the common welfare of Malik ibn
Anas were alike to him. It is true also that both
had been practically saved undei agreement. But
THE FOUR SOURCES 107
he held fast by analogy, whether based on the Qur an
or on the usage of the Prophet. It was an essential
instrument for his purpose. As was said, " The laws
of the Qur an and of the usage are limited ; the pos
sible cases are unlimited ; that which is unlimited can
never be contained in that which is limited." But in
ash-Shafi i s use of analogy there is a distinction to
be observed. In seeking to establish a parallelism
between a case that has arisen and a rule in the
Qur an or usage, which is similar in some points but
not precisely parallel, are we to look to external
points of resemblance, or may we go further and seek
to determine the reason (ilia) lying behind the rule
and from that draw our analogy ? The point seems
simple enough and the early speculative jurists sought
the reason. For that they were promptly attacked
by the traditionists. Such a method was an attempt
to look into the mysteries of God, they were told ;
man has no business to inquire after reasons, all he
has to do is to obey. The point thus raised was
fought over for centuries and schools are classified
according to their attitude toward it. The position
of ash-Shafi i seems to have been that the reason for
a command was to be considered in drawing an anal
ogy, but that there must be some clear guide, in the
text itself, pointing to the reason. He thus left him
self free to consider the causes of the divine com
mands and yet produced the appearance of avoiding
any irreverence or impiety in doing so.
Such then are the four sources or bases (asls) of
jurisprudence as accepted and defined by ash-Shafi i
Qur an, prophetic usage, analogy, agreement. The
108 DEVELOPMENT OF JURISPRUDENCE
last has come to bear more and more weight. Every
Shafi ite law book begins each section with words to
this effect, " The basis of this rule, before the agree
ment (qabla-1-ijma), is " Qur an or usage as the case
may be. The agreement must put its stamp on
every rule to make it valid. Further, all the now
existing schools have practically accepted ash-Shafi i s
classification of the sources and many have contended
that a lawyer, no matter what his school, who does
not use all these four sources, cannot be permitted
to act as a judge. Ash-Shafi i has accomplished his
own definition of a true jurist, " Not he is a jurist
who gathers statements and prefers one of them, but
he who establishes a new principle from which a
hundred branches may spring."
But the extreme traditionists were little satisfied
with this compromise. They objected to analogy
and they objected to agreement ; nothing but the
pure law of God and the Prophet would satisfy them.
And their numbers were undoubtedly large. The
common people always heard traditions gladly, and
it was easy to turn to ridicule the subtleties of the
professional lawyers. How much simpler, it struck
the average mind, it would be to follow some clear
and unambiguous saying of the Prophet ; then one
could feel secure. This desire of the plain man to
take traditions and interpret them strictly and liter
ally was met by the school of Da ud az-Zahiri, David
the literalist. He was born three or four years be
fore the death of ash-Shafi i, which occurred in 204.
He was trained as a Shafi ite and that, too, of the nar
rower, more traditional type ; but it was not tradi-
109
tional enough for him. So he had to cut himself
loose and form a school of his own. He rejected
utterly analogy ; he limited agreement, as a source,
to the agreement of the immediate Companions of
Muhammad, and in this he has been followed by the
Wahhabites alone among moderns ; he limited him
self to Qur an and prophetic usage.
In another point also, he diverged. Ash-Shafi i
had evidently exercised a very great personal influence
upon his followers. All looked up to him and were
prepared to swear to his words. So there grew up a
tendency for a scholar to take a thing upon the word
of his master. " Ash-Shafi i taught so ; I am a
Shafi ite and I hold so." This, too, Da ud utterly re
jected. The scholar must examine the proofs for him
self and form his own opinion. But he had another
peculiarity, and one which gained him the name of
literalist. Everything, Qur an and tradition, must be
taken in the most exact sense, however absurd it
might be. Of course, to have gone an inch beyond
the very first meaning of the words would have been
to stray in the direction of analogy. Yet, as fate
would have it, to analogy, more or less, he had in
the end to come. The inexorable law that the lim
ited cannot bound the unlimited was proved again.
"Analogy is like carrion," confessed a very much
earlier traditionist, " when there is nothing else you
eat it." Da ud tried to make his meal more palata
ble by a change in name. He called it a proof
(dalil) instead of a source (asl) ; but what difference
of idea he involved in that it is hard to determine.
This brought him to the doctrine of cause, already
110 DEVELOPMENT OF JURISPRUDENCE
mentioned. Were we at liberty to seek the cause of
a divine word or action and lead our " proof " from
that ? If the cause was directly stated, then Da ud
held that we must regard it as having been the cause
in this case ; but we were not at liberty, he added, to
look for it, or on it, as cause in any other case.
It is evident that here we have to do with an im
possible man and school, and so the Muslim world
found. Most said roundly that it was illegal to per
mit a Zahirite to act as judge, on much the same
grounds that objection to circumstantial evidence will
throw out a man now as juror. If they had been using
modern language, they would have said that it was
because he was a hopeless crank. Yet the Zahirite
school lasted for centuries and drew long conse
quences, historical and theological, for which there is
no space here. It never held rank as an acknowl
edged school of Muslim law.
We now come to the last of the four schools, and
it, strange as its origin was, need not detain us long.
The Zahirite reaction had failed through its very ex
tremeness. It was left to a dead man and a devoted
Shafi ite to head the last attack upon the school of his
master. Ahmad ibn Hanbal was a theologian of the
first rank; he made no claim to be a constructive
lawyer. His Musnad has already been dealt with.
It is an immense collection of some thirty thousand
traditions, but these are not even arranged for le
gal purposes. He suffered terribly for the orthodox
faith in the rationalist persecution under the Khalifa
al-Ma mun, and his sufferings gained him the posi
tion of a saint. But he never dreamed of forming a
PRINCIPLES OF UNITY AND VARIETY 111
school, least of all in opposition to bis master, asli-
Shafi i. He died in 241, and after his death his
disciples drew together and the fourth school was
founded. It was simply reactionary and did not
make progress in any way. It minimized agreement
and analogy and tended toward literal interpretation.
As might be expected from its origin, its history has
been one of violence, of persecution and counter-
persecution, of insurrection and riot. Again and
again the streets of Baghdad ran blood from its
excesses. It has now the smallest following of the
four surviving schools.
There is no need to pursue this history further.
"With ash-Shafi i the great development of Muslim ju
risprudence closes. Legislation, equity, legal fiction
have done their parts ; the hope for the future lay, and
lies, in the principle of the agreement. The common-
sense of the Muslim community, working through
that expression of catholicity, has set aside in the
past even the undoubted letter oi the Qur an, and in
the future will still further break the grasp of that
dead hand. It is the principle of unity in Islam.
But there is a principle of variety as well. The four
schools of law whose origin has been traced are all
equally valid and their decisions equally sacred in
Muslim eyes. The believer may belong to any one
of these which he chooses ; he must belong to one ;
and when he has chosen his school, he accepts it and
its rules to the uttermost. Yet he does not cast out as
heretics the followers of the other schools. In every
chapter their codes differ more or less ; but each
school bears with the others ; sometimes, it may be,
112 DEVELOPMENT OF JURISPRUDENCE
with a superior tone, but still bears. This liberty of
variety in unity is again undoubtedly due to the
agreement. It has expressed itself, as it often does,
in apocryphal traditions from the Prophet, the last
rag of respect left to the traditionist school. Thus
we are told that the Prophet said, " The disagree
ment of My People is a Mercy from God." This
supplements and completes the other equally apocry
phal but equally important tradition : " My People
will never agree upon an error."
But there is a third principle at work which we
cannot view with the same favor. As said above,
every Muslim must attach himself to a legal school,
and may choose any one of these four. But once he
has chosen his school he is absolutely bound by
the decisions and rules of that school. This is the
principle against which the Zahirites protested, but
their protest, the only bit of sense they ever showed,
was in vain. The result of its working throughout cen
turies has been that now no one except from a spirit
of historical curiosity ever dreams of going back from
the text -books of the present day to the works of the
older masters. Further, such an attempt to get be
hind the later commentaries would not be permitted.
We have comment upon comment upon comment,
abstract of this and expansion of that ; but each
hangs by his predecessor and dares not go another
step backward. The great masters of the four schools
settled the broad principles ; they were authorities of
the first degree (mujtahidun mutlaq), second to Mu
hammad in virtue of his inspiration only. Second,
came the masters who had authority within the sep-
THE CANON AND CIVIL CODES 113
arate schools (mujtalddun fi-l-madhaliib) to determine
the questions that arose there. Third, masters of
still lesser rank for minor points (mujtaliidun bil-
fatwa. And so the chain runs on. The possibility
of a new legal school arising or of any considerable
change among these existing schools is flatly denied.
Every legist now has his place and degree of liberty
fixed, and he must be content.
These three principles, then, of catholic unity and
its ability to make and abrogate laws, of the liberty
of diversity in that unity, and of blind subjection to
the past within that diversity, these three principles
must be our hope and fear for the Muslim peoples.
What that future will be none can tell. The grasp
of the dead hand of Islam is close, but its grip at
many points has been forced to relax. Very early,
as has already been pointed out, the canon law had
to give way to the will of the sovereign, and ground
once lost it has never regained. Now, in every
Muslim country, except perhaps the Wahhabite state
in central Arabia, there are two codes of law admin
istered by two separate courts. The one judges by
this canon law and has cognizance of what we may
call private and family affairs, marriage, divorce, in
heritance. Its judges, at whose head in Turkey
stands the Shaykh al-Islam, a dignity first created by
the Ottoman Sultan Muhammad II in 1453, after
the capture of Constantinople, also give advice to
those who consult them on such personal matters as
details of the ritual law, the law of oaths and vows,
etc. The other court knows no law except the cus
tom of the country (urf t ado) and the will of the
114 DEVELOPMENT OF JURISPRUDENCE
ruler, expressed often in what are called Qanuns,
statutes. Thus, in Turkey at the present day, be
sides the codices of canon law, there is an accepted
and authoritative corpus of such Qanuns. It is based
on the Code Napoleon and administered by courts
under the Minister of Justice. This is the nearest
approach in Islam to the development by statute,
which comes last in Sir Henry Maine s analysis of
the growth of law. The court guided by these Qanuns
decides all matters of public and criminal law, all
affairs between man and man. Such is the legal
situation throughout the whole Muslim world, from
Sulu to the Atlantic and from Africa to China. The
canon lawyers, on their side, have never admitted
this to be anything but flat usurpation. There have
not failed some even who branded as heretics and
unbelievers those who took any part in such courts
of the world and the devil. They look back to the
good old days of the rightly guided Khalifas, when
there was but one law in Islam, and forward to the
days of the Mahdi when that law will be restored.
There, between a dead past and a hopeless future, we
may leave them. The real future is not theirs. Law
is greater than lawyers, and it works in the end for
justice and life.
Finally, it may be well to notice an important and
necessary modification which holds as to the above
statement that a Muslim may choose any one of the
four schools and may then follow its rules. As might
be expected, geographical influences weigh over
whelmingly in this choice. Certain countries are
Hanifite or Shafi ite ; in each, adherents of the other
DISTRIBUTION OF SCHOOLS 115
sects are rare. This geographical position may be
given roughly as follows : central Asia, northern India,
and the Turks everywhere are Hanifite. Lower Egypt,
Syria, southern India and the Malay Archipelago are
Shafi ite. Upper Egypt and North Africa west of
Egypt are Malikite. Practically, only the Wahha-
bites in central Arabia are Hanbalites. Further, the
position holds in Islam that the country, as a whole,
follows the legal creed of its ruler, just as it follows
his religion. It is not only cuius regio eius religio,
but cuius religio eius lex. Again and again, a revolu
tion in the state has driven one legal school from
power and installed another. Yet the situation oc
curs sometimes that a sovereign finds his people di
vided into two parties, each following a different rite,
and he then recognizes both by appointing Qadis be
longing to both, and enforcing the decisions of these
Qadis. Thus, at Zanzibar, at present, there are eight
Ibadite judges and two Shafi ite, all appointed by the
Sultan and backed by his authority. On the othei
hand, the Turkish government, ever since it felt itself
strong enough, has thrown the full weight of its in
fluence on the Hanifite side. In almost all countries
under its rule it appoints Hanifite judges only ; valid
legal decisions can be pronounced only according to
that rite. The private needs of non-Hanifites are
met by the appointment of salaried Muftis givers of
fatiuas, or legal opinions of the other rites.
In the above sketch there have been of necessity
two considerable omissions. The one is of Shi ite
and the other of Ibadite law. Neither seems of
sufficient importance to call for separate treatment.
116 DEVELOPMENT OF JURISPRUDENCE
The legal system of the Shi ites is derived from that
of the so-called Sunnites and differs in details only.
We have seen already (p. 38) that the Shi ites still
have Mujtahids who are not bound to the words of a
master, but can give decisions on their own responsi
bility. These seem to have in their hands the teach
ing power which strictly belongs only to the Hidden
Imam. They thus represent the principle of author
ity which is the governing conception of the Shi a.
The Sunnites, on the other hand, have reached the
point of recognizing that it is the People of Muham
mad as a whole which rules through its agreement.
In another point the Shi ite conception of authority
affects their legal system. They utterly reject the
idea of co-ordinate schools of law ; to the doctrine of
the varying (ikhtilaf) as it is called, and the liberty
of diversity which lies in it, they oppose the authority
of the Imam. There can be only one truth and there
can be no trifling with it even in details. Among the
Shi ites of the Zaydite sect this was affected also by
their philosophical studies and a philosophical doc
trine of the unity of truth ; but to the Imamites it is
an authoritative necessity and not one of thought.
Thus on two important points the Shi ites lack the
possibility of freedom and development which is to
be found with the Sunnites. Of the jurisprudence of
the Ibadites we know comparatively little. A full
examination of Ibadite fiqli would be of the high
est interest, as the separation of its line of descent
goes far back behind the formation of any of the
orthodox systems and it must have been codified to a
greater or less extent by Abd Allah ibn Ibad himself.
IBADITES 117
Its basis appears to be three-fold, Qur an, prophetic
usage, agreement naturally that of the Ibadite com
munity. There is no mention of analogy, and tradi
tions seem to have been used sparingly and critically.
Qur an bore the principal emphasis. See above,
(p. 26) for the Ibadite position on the form of the
state and on the nature of its headship.
PART III
Cljrologrn
CHAPTEE I
The three principles in the development ; first religious question
ings; Murji ites, Kharijites, Qadarites; influence of Christi
anity ; the Umayyads and Abbasids ; the Mu tazilites ; the
Qualities of God ; the Vision of God ; the creation of the
Qur an.
BEFOBE entering upon a consideration of the devel
opment of the theology of Islam, it will be well to
mark clearly the three principles which run continu
ously through that development, which conditioned
it for evil and for good and which are still working
in it. In dealing with jurisprudence and with the
theory of the state, we have already seen abundantly
how false is the current idea that Islam has ceased
to grow and has no hope of future development. The
organism of Islam, like every other organism, has
periods of rest when it appears to have reached a
cul de sac and to have outlived its life. But after
these periods come others of renewed quickening and
its vital energy pours itself forth again alter et idem.
In the state, we saw how the old realms passed into
decrepitude and decay, but new ones rose to take
their places. The despotism by the grace of God of
119
120 THEOLOGY
formal Islam was tempered by the sacred right of
insurrection and revolution, and the People of Mu
hammad, in spite of kings and princes, asserted, from
time to time, its unquenchable vitality.
In theology the spirit breathes through single
chosen men more than through the masses ; and, in
consequence, our treatment of it will take biographi
cal form wherever our knowledge renders that pos
sible.
But whether we have men or naked movements, the
begetters of which are names to us or less, three-
threads .are woven distinctly_JJarough the web of Mus
lim religious thought. There is tradition (naql) ; there
is reason (aql) ; and there is the unveiling of the mys
tic (kashf). They were in the tissue of Muhammad s
brain and they have been in his church since he died.
Now one would be most prominent, now another, ac
cording to the thinker of the time ; but all were pres
ent to some degree. Tradition in its strictest form
lives now only with the Wahhabites and the Brother
hood of as-Sanusi ; reason. Jhas become a scholastic
hand-maid of theology except among the modern
Indian Mu tazilites, whom orthodox Islam would no
more accept as Muslims than a Trinitarian of the
Westminster confession would give the name of
Christian to a Unitarian of the left Aving ; the inner
light of the mystic has assumed many forms, running
from plainest pantheism to mere devout ecstasy.
But in the church of Muhammad they are all work
ing still; and the catholicity of Islam, in spite of zeal
ots, persecutions and counter-persecutions, has at
tained here, too, as in law, a liberty of variety in unity.
THE THREE PRINCIPLES 121
Two of the principles we have met already in the
students of hadith and of speculative law. The Han-
balites maintained in theology their devotion to tradi
tion ; they fought for centuries all independent think
ing which sought to rise above what the fathers had
told ; they fought even scholastic theology of the
strictest type and would be content with nothing but
the rehearsal of the old dogmas in the old forms ; they
fought, too, the mystical life in all its phases. On the
other hand, Abu Hanifa was tinged with rationalism
and speculation in theology as in law, and his follow
ers have walked in his path. Even the mystical light
has been touched in our view of the theory of the
state. It has flourished most among the Shi ites,
who are driven to seek and to find an inner meaning
under the plain word of the Qur an, and whose devo
tion to Ali and his house and to their divine mission
has kept alive the thought of a continuous speaking
of God to mankind and of an exalting of mankind
into the presence of God. It is for the student, then,
to watch and hold fast these three guiding threads.
The development of Muslim theology, like that of
jurisprudence, could not begin till after the death of
Muhammad. So long as he lived and received infal
lible revelations in solution of all questions of faith
or usage that might come up, it is obvious that no
system of theology could be formed or even thought
of. Traditions, too, which have reached us, even
show him setting his face against all discussions of
dogma and repeating again and again, in answer to
metaphysical and theological questions, the crude
122 THEOLOGY
anthropomorphisms of the Qur an. But these ques
tions and answers are probably forgeries of the later
traditional school, shadows of future warfare thrown
back upon the screen of the patriarchal age. Again,
in the first twenty or thirty years after Muhammad s
death, the Muslims were too much occupied with the
propagation of their faith to think what that faith
exactly was. Thus, it seems that the questioning
spirit in this direction was aroused comparatively
late and remained for some time on what might be
called a private basis. Individual men had their in
dividual views, but sects did not quickly arise, and
when they did were vague and hard to define in their
positions. It may be said, broadly, that everything
which has reached us about the early Muslim heresies
is uncertain, confused and unsatisfactory. Names,
dates, influences and doctrines are all seen through
a haze, and nothing more than an approximation to
an outline can be attempted. Vague stories are handed
down of the early questionings and disputings of
certain ahl-al-ahiva, "people of wandering desires,"
a name singularly descriptive of the always flighty
and sceptical Arabs ; of how they compared Script
ure with Scripture and got up theological debates,
splitting points and defining issues, to great scandal
and troubling of spirit among the simpler-minded
pious. These were not yet heretics ; they were the
first investigators and systematizers.
Yet two sects loom up through the mist and their
existence can be tolerably conditioned through the
historical facts and philosophical necessities of the
time. The one is that of the Murji ites, and the other
MURJl lTES 123
of the Qadarites. A Murji ite is literally " one who
defers or postpones," in this case postpones judgment
until it is pronounced by God on the Day of Judg
ment. They arose as a sect during and out of the
civil war between the Shi ites, the Kharijites and
the Umayyads. All these parties claimed to be Mus
lims, and most of them claimed that they were the
only true Muslims and that the others were un
believers. This was especially the attitude of the
Shi ites and Kharijites toward the Umayyads ; to
them, the Umayyads, as we have seen already, were
godless heathen who professed Islam, but oppressed
and slaughtered the true saints of God. The Mur-
ji ites, on the other hand, worked out a view on which
they could still support the Umayyads without homo
logating all their actions and condemning all their
opponents. The Umayyads, they held, were de facto
the rulers of the Muslim state ; fealty had been
sworn to them and they confessed the Unity of God
and the apostleship of the Prophet. Thus, they
were not polytheists, and there is no sin that can
possibly be compared with the sin of polytheism
(shirk). It was, therefore, the duty of all Muslims to
acknowledge their sovereignty and to postpone until
the secrets of the Last Day all judgment or condemna
tion of any sins they might have committed. Sins
less than polytheism could justify no one in rising in
revolt against them and in breaking the oath of fealty.
Such seems to have been the origin of the Murji ites,
and it was the origin also of the theory of the ac
complished fact in the state, of which we have had to
take account several times. Thus, between the fa-
124 THEOLOGY
natical venerators of the canon law, to whom all the
Khalifas, after the first four, were an abomination,
and the purely worldly lawyers of the court party,
there came a group of pious theologians who taught
that the good of the Muslim community required
obedience to the ruler of the time, even though his
personal un worthiness were plain. As a consequence,
success can legitimate anything in the Muslim state.
But with the passing away of the situation which
gave rise to Murji ism, it itself changed from politics
to theology. As a political party it had opposed the
political puritanisin of the Kharijites ; it now came to
oppose the uncompromising spirit in which these
damned all who differed from them even in details
and brandished the terrors of the wrath of God over
their opponents. It is true that this came natural to
Islam. The earlier Muslims seem in general to have
been oppressed by a singularly gloomy fatalism. To
use modern theological language, they labored un
der a terrible consciousness of sin. They viewed
the world as an evil temptress, seducing men from
heavenly things. Their lives were hedged about
with sins, great and little, and each deserved the
eternal wrath of God. The recollection of their lat
ter end they kept ever before them and the terrors
that it would bring, for they felt that no amount of
faith in God and His Prophet could save them in the
judgment to come. The roots of this run far back.
Before the time of Muhammad and at his time there
were among the Arab tribes, scattered here and there,
many men who felt a profound dissatisfaction with
heathenism, its doctrines and religious rites. The
THE WRATH OF GOD IX ISLAM 125
conception of God and the burden of life pressed
heavily upon them. They saw men pass away and
descend into the grave, and they asked whither they
had gone and what had become of them. The thought
of this fleeting, transitory life and of the ocean of
darkness and mystery that lies around it, drove them
away to seek truth in solitude and the deserts. They
were called Hanifs the word is of very doubtful
derivation and Muhammad himself, in the early
part of his career, reckoned himself one of them. But
we have evidence from heathen Arab poetry that these
Hanifs were regarded as much the same as Christian
monks, and that the term hanifw&B used as a syn
onym for rahib, monk.
And, in truth, the very soul of Islam sprang from
these solitary hermits, scattered here and there
throughout the desert, consecrating their lives to
God, and fleeing from the wrath to come. Even in
pre-Islamic Arabic poetry we feel how strong was
the impression made on the Arab mind by the gaunt,
weird men with their endless watchings and night
prayers. Again and again there is allusion to the
lamp of the hermit shining through the darkness, and
we have pictures of the caravan or of the solitary
traveller on the night journey cheered and guided by
its glimmer. These Christian hermits and the long
deserted ruins telling of old, forgotten tribes judged
and overthrown by God, as the Arabs held and hold
that lie throughout the Syrian waste and along the
caravan routes were the two things that most stirred
the imagination of Muhammad and went to form his
faith. To Muhammad, and to the Semite always, the
126 THEOLOGY
whole of life was but a long procession from the
great deep to the great deep again. Where are the
kings and rulers of the earth ? Where are the peoples
that were mighty in their day ? The hand of God
smote them and they are not. There is naught real in
the world but God. From Him we are, and unto
Him we return. There is nothing for man but to
fear and worship. The world is deceitful and makes
sport of them that trust it.
Such is the oversong of all Muslim thought, the
faith to which the Semite ever returns in the end.
To this the later Murji ites opposed a doctrine of
Faith, which was Pauline in its sweep. Faith, they
declared, saved, and Faith alone. If the sinner be
lieved in God and His Prophet he would not remain
in the fire. The Xharijites, on the other hand, held
that the sinner who died unrepentant would remain
therein eternally, even though he had confessed Is
lam with his lips. The unrepentant sinner, they
considered, could not be a believer in the true sense.
This is still the Ibadite position, and from it devel
oped one of the most important controversies of Is
lam as to the precise nature of faith. Some extreme
Murji ites held that faith (iman) was a confession in
the heart, private intercourse with God, as opposed
to Islam, public confession with the lips. Thus, one
could be a believer (mumiri), and outwardly confess
Judaism or Christianity ; to be a professed Muslim
was not necessary. This is like the doctrine of the
Imamites, called taqiya, that it is allowable in time
of stress to dissemble one s religious views ; and it
is worth noticing that Jahm ibn Safwan (killed, 131 ?),
QADAEITES 127
one of these extreme Murji ites, was a Persian pros
elyte in rebellion against the Arab rule, and of the
loosest religious conduct. But these Antinomians
were no more Muslims than the Anabaptists of Mun-
ster had a claim to be Christians. The other wing
of the Murji ites is represented by Abu Hanifa, who
held that faith (iman) is acknowledgment with the
tongue as well as the heart and that works are a neces
sary supplement. This is little different from the
orthodox position which grew up, that persuasion,
confession, and works made up faith. When Murji-
ism dropped out of existence as a^sect it left as its
contribution to Islam a distinction between great and
little sins (Jcabwus, saghiras), and the position that even
great sins, if not involving polytheism (shirk), would
not exclude the believer forever from the Garden.
The second sect, that of Qadarites, had its origin
inja~philosophical necessity of the human mind. A
perception of the contradiction between man s con
sciousness of freedom and responsibility, on the one
hand, and the absolute rule and predestination of
God, on the other, is the usual beginning of the think
ing life, both in individuals and in races. It was so
in Islam. In theology as in law, Muhammad had
been an opportunist pure and simple. On the one
hand, his Allah is the absolute Semitic despot who
guides aright and leads astray, who seals up the
hearts of men and opens them again, who is mighty
over all. On the other hand, men are exhorted to
repentance, and punishment is threatened against
them if they remain hardened in their unbelief. All
these phases of a wandering and intensely subjective
128 THEOLOGY
mind, which lived only in the perception of the mo
ment, appear in the Qur an. Muhammad was a
poet rather than a theologian ; just as he was a proph
et rather than a legislator. As soon, then, as the
Muslims paused in their career of conquest and be
gan to think at all, they thought of this. Naturally,
so long as they were fighting in the Path of God, it
was the conception of God s absolute sovereignty
which most appealed to them ; by it their fates were
fixed, and they charged without fear the ranks of the
unbelievers. In these earliest times, the fatalistic
passages bore most stress and the others were ex
plained away. This helped, at least, to bring it
about that the party which in time came to profess
the freedom of man s will, began and ended as an
heretical sect. But it only helped, and we must never
lose sight of the fact that the eventual victory in Is
lam of the absolute doctrine of God s eternal decree
was the victory of the more fundamental of Muham
mad s conflicting conceptions. The other had been
much more a campaigning expedient.
This sect of Qadarites, whose origin we have
been conditioning, derived its name from their posi
tion that a man possessed qadar, or power, over his
actions. One of the first of them was a certain
Ma bad al-Juhani, who paid for his heresy with his
life in A.H. 80. Historians tell that he with Ata ibn
Yassar, another of similar opinions, came one day to
the celebrated ascetic, al-Hasan al-Basri (d. 110),
and said, " O Abu Sa id, those kings shed the blood
of the Muslims, and do grievous things and say
that their works are by the decree of God." To
ORIGIN OP MU TAZILITES 129
this al-Hasan replied, "The enemies of God lie."
The story is only important as showing how the
times and their changes were widening men s
thoughts. Very soon, now, we corne from these
drifting tendencies to a formal sect with a formal
secession and a fixed name. The Murji ites and
the Qadarites melt from the scene, some of their
tenets pass into orthodox Islam ; some into the new
sect.
The story of its founding again connects with the
outstanding figure of al-Hasan al-Basri. He seems
to have been the chief centre of the religious life and
movements of his time ; his pupils appear and his in
fluence shows itself in all the later schools. Some
one came to him as he sat among his pupils and
asked what his view was between the conflicting
Murji ites and Wa idites, the first holding that the
committer of a great sin, if he had faith, was not an
unbeliever, was to be accepted as a Muslim and his
case left in the hands of God ; the other laying more
stress upon the threats (wa id) in the Book of God
and teaching that the committer of a great sin could
not be a believer, that he had, ipso facto, abandoned
the true faith, must go into the Fire and abide there.
Before the master could reply, one of his pupils
some say Amr ibn Ubayd (d. circ. 144), others,
Wasil ibn Ata (d. 131) broke in with the assertion
of an intermediate position. Such an one was neither
a believer nor an unbeliever. Then he left the circle
which sat round the master, went to another part
of the mosque and began to develop his view to
those who gathered round him. The name believer
130 THEOLOGY
(mu miri), he taught, was a term of praise, and an evil
doer was not worthy of praise, and could not have that
name applied to him. But he was not an unbeliever,
either, for he assented to the faith. If he, then, died
unrepentant, he must abide forever in the Fire for
there are only two divisions in the next world,
heaven and hell but his torments would be miti
gated on account of his faith. The position to
which orthodox Islam eventually came was that a
believer could commit a great sin. If he did so, and
died unrepentant, he went to hell ; but after a time
would be permitted to enter heaven. Thus, hell be
came for believers a sort of purgatory. On this
secession, al-Hasan only said " Ptazala anna 11 -
He has seceded from us. So the new party was
called the Mu tazila, the Secession. That, at least, is
the story, which may be taken for what it is worth.
The fixed facts are the rise at the beginning of the
second century after the Hijra of a tolerably definite
school of dissenters from the traditional ideas, and
their application of reason to the dogmas of the
Qur an.
We have noted already the influence of Christian
ity on Muhammad through the hermits of the des
ert. From it sprang the asceticism of Islam and
that asceticism grew and developed into quietism
and thence into mysticism. The last step was still
in the future, but already at this time there were
wandering monks who imitated their Christian breth
ren in the wearing of a coarse woollen frock and were
thence called Sufis, from suf, wool. It was not long
before Sufi came to mean mystic, and the third of the
INFLUENCE OP JOHN OF DAMASCUS 131
three great threads was definitely woven into the
fabric of Muslim thought. But that was not the
limit of Christian influence. Those anchorites in
their caves and huts had little training in the theol
ogy of the schools ; the dogmas of their faith were of
a practical simplicity. But in the development of the
Murji ites and Qadarites it is impossible to mistake
the workings of the dialectic refinements of Greek
theology as developed in the Byzantine and Syrian
schools. It is worth notice, too, that, while the
political heresies of the Shi ites and Kharijites held
sway mostly in Arabia, Mesopotamia, and Persia,
these more religious heresies seem to have arisen in
Syria first and especially at Damascus, the seat of
the Umayyads.
The Umayyad dynasty, we should remember, was"\
in many ways a return to pre-Muslim times and to \
an easy enjoyment of worldly things ; it was a rejec- j
tion of the yoke of Muhammad in all but form and \
name. The fear of the wrath of God had small part J
with the most of them ; sometimes it appeared in the
form of an insane rebellion and defiance. Further,
as Muslim governments always have done, they
sought aid in their task of governing from their non-
Muslim subjects. So it came about that Sergius,
the father of Johannes Damascenus, was treasurer
under them and that after his death, this John of
Damascus himself, the last great doctor of the Greek
Church and the man under whose hands its theology
assumed final form, became wazir and held that post
until he withdrew from the world and turned to the
contemplative life. In his writings and in those of
132 THEOLOGY
his pupil, Theodoras Abucara (d. A.D. 826), there are
polemic treatises on Islam, cast in the form of dis
cussions between Christians and Muslims. These
represent, there can be little doubt, a characteristic
of the time. The close agreement of Murji ite and
Qadarite ideas with those formulated and defended
by John of Damascus and by the Greek Church gen
erally can only be so explained. The Murji ite re
jection of eternal punishment and emphasis on the
goodness of God and His love for His creatures, the
Qadarite doctrine of freewill and responsibility, are
to be explained in the same way as we have already
explained the presence of sentences in the Muslim
fiqli which seem to be taken bodily from the Roman
codes. In this case, also, we are not to think of the
Muslim divines as studying the writings of the Greek
fathers, but as picking up ideas from them in practi
cal intercourse and controversy. The very form of
the tract of John of Damascus is significant, " When
the Saracen says to you such and such, then you will
reply. . . ." This, as a whole, is a subject
which calls for investigation, but so far it is clear
that the influence of Greek theology on Islam can
hardly be overestimated. The one outstanding fact
of the enormous emphasis laid by both on the doc
trine of the nature of God and His attributes is
enough. It may even be conjectured that the harsher
views developed by western Muslims, and especially
by the theologians of Spain, were due, on the other
hand, to Augustinian and Roman influence. It is,
to say the least, a curious coincidence that Spanish
Islam never took kindly to metaphysical or scholas-
INFLUENCES AT BAGHDAD 133
tic theology, in the exact sense, but gave almost all
its energy to canon law.
But there were other influences to come. With
the fall of the Umayyads and the rise of the Abba-
sids, the intellectual centre of the empire moved to
the basin of the Euphrates and the Tigris. The story
of the founding of Baghdad there, in 145, we have
already heard. We have seen, too, that the victory
of the Abbasids was, in a sense, a conquest of the
Arabs by the Persians. Grcecia capta and the rest
earner true here; the battles of al-Qadisiya and Naha-
wand were avenged; Persian ideas and Persian re
ligion began slowly to work on the faith of Muham
mad. At the court of the earliest Abbasids it was
fashionable to affect a little free thought. People
were becoming enlightened and played with philoso-
.phy and science. Greek philosophy, Zoroastrian-
ism, Manichaeism, the old heathenism of Harran,
Judaism, Christianity all were in the air and mak
ing themselves felt. So long as the adherents and
teachers of these took them in a purely academic
way, were good subjects and made no trouble, the
earlier Abbasids encouraged their efforts, gathered in
the scientific harvest, paid well for translations, in
struments, and investigations, and generally posed as
patrons of progress.
But a line had to be drawn somewhere and drawn
tightly. The victory of the Abbasids had raised
high hopeS among the Persian nationalists. They
had thought that they were rallying to the overthrow
of the Arabs, and found, when all was done, that
they had got only another Arab dynasty. So revolts
134 THEOLOGY
had begun to break out afresh, and now, curiously
enough, they were of a marked religious character.
They were an expression of religious sects, Buddh
istic, Zoroastrian, Manichsean, and parties with pro
phetic leaders of their own ; all are swept together
by Muslim writers as Zindiqs, probably literally,
" initiates," originally Manichoeans, thereafter, prac
tically non-Muslims concealing their unbelief. For
when not in open revolt they must needs profess
Islam. In 167, we find al-Mahdi, who was also, it
is true, much more strict than his father, al-Mansur,
appointing a grand inquisitor to deal with such here
tics. Al-Mansur, however, had contented himself
with crushing actual rebellion ; and Christian, Jew,
Zoroastrian, and heathen of Harran were tolerated
so long as they brought to him the fruits of Greek
science and philosophy.
That they did willingly, and so, through three in
termediaries, science came to the Arabs. There was
a heathen Syrian source with its centre at Harran, of
which we know comparatively little. There was a
Christian Syrian source working from the multitudi
nous monasteries scattered over the country. There
was a Persian source by which natural science, and
medicine especially, were passed on. Already in the
fifth century A.D. an academy of medicine and phi
losophy had been founded at Gondeshapur in Khuzi-
stan. One of the directors of this institution was
summoned, in 148, to prescribe for al-Mansur, and
from that time on it furnished court physicians to
the Abbasids. On these three paths, then, Aristotle
and Plato, Euclid and Ptolemy, Galen and Hippocra
tes reached the Muslim peoples.
GOLDEX AGE OF MUSLIM SCIENCE 135
The first hundred years of the Abbasid Khalifate
was the golden age of Muslim science, the period of
growth and development for the People of Muham
mad fairly as a whole. Intellectual life did not cease
with the close of that period, but the Khalifate ceased
to aid in carrying the torch. Thereafter, learning was
protected and fostered by individual rulers here and
there, and individual investigators and scholars still
went on their own quiet paths. But free intellectual
life among the people was checked, and such learn
ing as still generally flourished fell more and more
between fixed bounds. Scholasticism, with its formal
methods and systems, its subtle deductions and end
less ramifications of proof and counter-proof, drew
away attention from the facts of nature. The ori
ental brain studied itself and its own workings to the
point of dizziness, and then turned and clung fast to
the certainties of revelation. Under this spell heresy
and orthodoxy proved alike sterile.
We return, now, to the beginnings of the Mu tazi-
lites. These served themselves heirs upon the Qad-
arites and denied that God predestined the actions
of men. I)eaklLaud lif^ sickness, health, and exter
nal vicissitudes came, they admitted, by God s qadar,
but it was unthinkable that man should be punished
for actions not in his control. The freedom of the
will is an a priori certainty, and man possesses qadar
over his own actions. This was the position of
Wasil ibn Ata, of whom we have already heard. But
to it he added a second doctrine, the origin of which
is obscure, although suggestive of discussions with
Greek theologians. The Qur an describes God as
136 THEOLOGY
willing, knowing, decreeing, etc. strictly as the "Will
ing One, the Knowing One, the Decreeing One, etc.
and the orthodox hold that such expressions could
only mean that God possesses as Qualities (sifat)
Will, Knowledge, Power, Life, etc. To this Wasil
raised objections. God was One, and such Qualities
would be separate Beings. Thus, his party and the
Mu tazilites "always called themselves the People of
Unity and Justice (Ald-at-taivhid wal adl) ; the Unity
being of the divine nature, the Justice consisting in
that they opposed God s qadar over men and held
that He must do for the creature that which was best
for it. Orthodox Islam held and holds that there
can be no necessity upon God, even to do justice ;
He is absolutely free, and what He does man must
accept. It flatly opposes the position held by the
Mu tazilites in general, that good and evil can be
perceived and distinguished by the intellect (aql).
Good and evil have their nature by God s will, and
man can learn to know them only by God s teachings
and commands. Thus, except through revelation,
there can be neither theology nor ethics.
The next great advance was made by Abu Hudhayl
Muhammad al-Allaf (d. circa 226), a disciple of the
second generation from Wasil. At his hands the
doctrine of God s qualities assumed a more definite
form. Wasil had reduced God to a vague unity, a
kind of eternal oneness. Abu Hudhayl taught that
the qualities were not in His essence, and thus sepa
rable from it, thinkable apart from it, but that they
were His essence. Thus, God was omnipotent by
His omnipotence, but it was His essence and not in
ABU HUDHAYL 137
His essence. He was omniscient by His omnis
cience and it was His essence. Further, he held that
these qualities must be either negations or relations.
Nothing positive can be asserted of them, for that
would mean that there was in God the complexity of
subject and predicate, being and quality ; and God is
absolute Unity. This view the Muslim theologians
regard as a close approximation to the Christian
Trinity ; for them, the persons of the Trinity have
always been personified qualities, and such seems
really to have been the view of John of Damascus.
Further, God s Will, according to Abu Hudhayl, as
expressed in His Creative Word, did not necessarily
exist in a subject (fi mahall, in subiecto). When God
said, " Be ! " creatively, there was no subject. Again,
he endeavored and in this he was followed by most
of the Mu tazilites to cut down the number of God s
attributes. His will, he said, was a form of His
knowledge ; He knew that there was good in an
action, and that knowledge was His will.
His position on the qadar question was peculiar.
With regard to this world, he was a Qadarite ; but
in the next world, both in heaven and in hell, he
thought that all changes were by divine necessity.
Otherwise, that is, if men were free, there would be
obligation to observe a law (taklif) ; but there is no
such obligation in the other world. Thus, whatever
happened there happened by God s decree. Further,
he taught that, eventually, nothing would happen
there ; that there would be no changes, but only an
endless stillness in which those in heaven had all its
joys and those in hell all its pains. This is a close
138 THEOLOGY
approximation to the view of Jahm ibn Saf wan, who
held that after the judgment both heaven and hell
would pass away and God remain alone as He was
in the beginning. To these doctrines Abu Hudhayl
seems to have been led by two considerations, both
significant for the drift of the Mu tazilites. First,
there was about their reasonings a grimness of logic
touched with utilitarianism. Thus, from their posi
tion that man could come by the light of his reason
to the knowledge of God and of virtue, they drew the
conclusion that it was man s duty so to attain, and
that God would damn eternally every man who did
not. Their utilitarianism, again, comes out strik
ingly in their view of heaven and hell. These, at
present, were serving no useful purpose because they
had no inhabitants ; therefore, at present, they did
not exist. But this made difficulties for Abu Hud
hayl. What has a beginning. must have an end. So
he explained the end as the ceasing of all changes.
Second, he shows clear evidence of influence from
Greek philosophy. The Qur an teaches that the world
has been created in time ; Aristotle, that it is from
eternity and to eternity. The creation, Abu Hudhayl
applied to changes ; before that, the world ivas, but
in eternal rest. Hereafter, all changes will cease ;
rest will again enter and endure to all eternity. We
shall see how largely this doctrine was advanced and
developed by his successors.
But there were further complications in the doc
trine of man s actions and into some of these we must
enter, on account of their later importance. Not
o very thing that comes from the action of a man is by
ABU HUDHAYL 139
his action. God has a creative part in it, apparently
as regards the effects. Especially, knowledge in the
mind of a pupil does not come from the teacher, but
from God. The idea seems to be that the teacher
may teach, but that the being taught in the pupil is
a divine working. Similarly, he distinguished motions
in the mind, which he held were not altogether due
to the man, and external motions which were. There
is given, too, to a man at the time of his performing
an action an ability to perform the action, which is a
special accident in him apart from any mere sound
ness of health or limb.
In these ways, Abu Hudhayl recognized God s
working through man. Another of his positions had
a similar basis and was a curious combination of his
torical criticism and mysticism, a combination which
we shall find later in al-Ghazzali, a much greater man.
The evidence of tradition for things dealing with the
Unseen World (al-ghayb) he rejected. Twenty wit
nesses might hand on the tradition in question, but
it was not to be received unless among them there
was one, at least, of the People of Paradise. At all
times, he taught, there were in the world these Friends
of God (aivliya Allah, sing, ivali), who were protected
against all greater sins and could not lie. It is the
word of these that is the basis for belief, and the tra
dition is merely a statement of what they have said.
This shows clearly how far the doctrine of the ecstatic
life and of knowledge gained through direct inter
course between the believer and God had already ad
vanced.
But Abu Hudhayl was only one in a group of dar-
140 THEOLOGY
ing and absolutely free-minded speculators. They
were applying to the ideas of the Qur an the keen
solvent of Greek dialectic, and the results which they
obtained were of the most fantastically original char
acter. Thrown into the wide sea and utter freedom
of Greek thought, their ideas had expanded to the
bursting point and, more than even a German meta
physician, they had lost touch of the ground of or
dinary life, with its reasonable probabilities, and
were swinging loose on a wild hunt after ultimate
truth, wielding as their weapons definitions and syl
logisms. The lyric fervors of Muhammad in the
Qur an gave scope enough of strange ideas from which
to start, or which had to be explained away. Their
belief in the powers of the science of logic was un
failing, and, armed with Aristotle s " Analytics," they
felt sure that certainty was within their reach. It
was at the court and under the protection of al-
Ma rnun that they especially flourished, and some
account of the leading spirits among them will be
necessary before we describe how they reached their
utmost pride of power and how they fell.
An-Nazzam (d. 231) has the credit among later
historians of having made use, to a high degree, of
the doctrines of the Greek philosophers. He was
one of the Satans of the Qadarites, say they ; he read
the books of the philosophers and mingled their
teachings with the doctrines of the Mu tazilites. He
taught, in the most absolute way, that God could do
nothing to a creature, either in this world or in the
next, that was not for the creature s good and in ac
cordance with strict justice. It was not only that
AN-NAZZAM 141
God would not do it ; He had not the power to do
anything evil. Evidently the personality of God was
fast vanishing behind an absolute law of right. To
this, orthodox Islam opposed the doctrine that God
could do anything ; He could forgive whom He willed,
and punish whom He willed. Further, he taught
that God s willing a thing meant only that He did it
in accordance with His knowledge ; and when He
willed the action of a creature that meant only that
He commanded it. This is evidently to evade phrases
in the Qur an. Man, again, he taught, was spirit (ruh\
and the body (ladan) was only an instrument. But
this spirit was a fine substance which flowed in the
body like the essential oil in a rose, or butter in milk.
In a universe determined by strict law, man alone
was undetermined. He could throw a stone into the
air, and by his action the stone went up ; but when
the force of his throw was exhausted it came again
under law and fell. If he had only asked himself
how it came to fall, strange things might have hap
pened. But he, and all his fellows, were only play
ing with words like counters. Further, he taught
that God had created all created things at once, but
that He kept them in concealment until it was time
for them to enter on the stage of visible being and do
their part. All things that ever will exist are thus
existing now, but, in a sense, in retentis. This seems
to be another attempt to solve the problem of crea
tion in time, and it had important consequences.
Further, the Qur an was no miracle (mu jiz) to him.
The only miraculous elements in it are the narratives
about the Unseen World, and past things and things
142 THEOLOGY
to come, and the fact that God deprived the Arabs of
the power of writing anything like it. But for that, they
could easily have surpassed it as literature. As a
high Imamite he rejected utterly agreement and
analogy. Only the divinely appointed Imam had
the right to supplement the teaching of Muhammad.
We pass over some of his metaphysical views, odd
as they are. The Muslim writers on theological his
tory have classified him rightly as more of a physicist
than a metaphysician. He had a concrete mind and
that fondness for playing with metaphysical para
doxes which often goes with it.
Another of the group was Bishr ibn al-Mu tamir.
His principal contribution was the doctrine of tawlid
and taivallud, begetting and deriving. It is the trans
mission of a single action through a series of objects ;
the agent meant to affect the first object only ; the
effect on the others followed. Thus, he moves his
hand, and the ring on his finger is moved. What re
lation of responsibility, then, does he bear to these
derived effects? Generally, how are we to view a
complex of causes acting together and across one
another? The answer of later orthodox Islam is
worth giving at this point. God creates in the man
the will to move his hand ; He creates the movement
of the hand and also the movement of the ring. All
is by God s direct creation at the time. Further,
could God punish an infant or one who had no
knowledge of the faith ? Bishr s reply on the first
point was simply a bit of logical jugglery to avoid
saying frankly that there was anything that God
could not do. His answer on the second was that
BISHR ; MA MAR 143
God could have made a different and much better
world than this, a world in which all men might have
been saved. But He was not bound to make a bet
ter world in this Bishr separates from the other
Mu tazilites He was only bound to give man free
will and, then, either revelation to guide him to sal
vation or reason to show him natural law.
With Ma mar ibn Abbad, the philosophies wax
faster and more furious. He succeeded in reducing
the conception of God to a bare, indefinable some
thing. "We could not say that God had knowledge.
For it must be of something in Himself or outside of
Himself. If the first, then there was a union of
knower and known, and that is impossible; or a dual
ity in the divine nature, and that was equally impos
sible. Here Ma mar was evidently on the road to
Hegel. If the second, then His knowledge depended
on the existence of something other than Himself, and
that did away with His absoluteness. Similarly, he
dealt with God s Will. Nor could He be described
as qadim, prior to all things, for that word, in Arabic,
suggested sequence and time. By all this, he evi
dently meant that our conceptions cannot be applied
to God ; that God is unthinkable by us. On creation,
he developed the ideas of an-Nazzam. Substances
(jisms) only were created by God, and by " sub
stances " he seems to mean matter as a whole ; all
changes in them, or it, come either of necessity from
its nature, as when fire burns, the sun warms ; or of
free-will, as always in the animal world. God has no
part in these things. He has given the material and
has nothing to do with the coming and going of
144 THEOLOGY
separate bodies ; such are simple changes, forms of
existence, and proceed from the matter itself. Man
is an incorporeal substance. The soul is the man
and his body is but a cover. This true man can only
know and will ; the body perceives and does.
The last of this group whose views we need con
sider, is Thumama ibn Ashras. He was of very du
bious morals ; was imprisoned as a heretic by Harun
ar-Rashid, but highly favorecU by al-Ma munpin whose
Khalifate he died, A.H. 213. He held that actions
produced through taivalliid had no agent, either God
or man. That knowledge of good and evil could be
produced by tawallud through speculation, and is,
therefore, an action without an agent, and required
even before revelation. That Jews, Christians, Magi-
ans will be turned into dust in the next world and
will not enter either Paradise or Hell ; the same will
be the fate of cattle and children. That any one of
the unbelievers who does not know his Creator is ex
cusable. That all knowledge is a priori. That the
only action which men possess is will; everything
besides that is a production without a producer.
That the world is the act of God by His nature, i.e.,
it is an act which His nature compels Him to pro
duce ; is, therefore, from eternity and to eternity with
Him. It may be doubted how far Thumama was a
professional theologian and how far he was a free-
thinking, easy-living man of letters.
In all this, the influence of Greek theology and of
Aristotle can be clearly traced. With Aristotle had
come to them the idea of the world as law, AH eteaal-
construction subsisting and developing on fixed prin-
THE VISION OF GOD 145
ciples. This conception of law shows itself in their
thought frankly at strife with Muhammad s concep
tion of God as will, as the sovereign over all. Hence,
the crudities and devices by which they strove to
make good their footing on strange ground and keep
a right to the name of Muslim, while changing the
essence of their faith. The anthropomorphic God of
Muhammad, who has face and hands, is seen in Para
dise by the believer and settles Himself firmly upon
His throne, becomes a spirit, and a spirit, too, of the
vaguest kind.
It remains now only to touch upon one or two
points common to all the Mu tazilites. First, the
Beatific Vision of God in Paradise. It was a fixed
agreement of the early Muslim Church, based on
texts of the Qur an and on tradition, that some be
lievers, at least, would see and gaze upon God in the
other world ; this was the highest delight held out to
them. But the Mu tazilites perceived that vision in
volved a directing of the eyes on the part of the seer
and position on the part of the seen. _jGcod_iniast,
therefore, be in a place and thus limited. So they
were compelled to reject the agreement and the tra
ditions in question and to explain away the passages
in the Qur an. Similarly, in Qur an vii. 52, we read
that God settled Himself firmly upon His throne.
This, with other anthropomorphisms of hands and
feet and eyes, the Mu tazilites had to explain away
in a more or less cumbrous fashion.
With one other detail of this class we must deal
at greater length. It was destined to be the vital
point of the whole Mu tazilite controversy and the test
146 THEOLOGY
by which theologians were tried and had their places
assigned. It had a weighty part also in bringing
about the fall of the Mu tazilites. There had grown
up very early in the Muslim community an un
bounded reverence and awe in the presence of the
Qur an. In it God speaks, addressing His servant,
the Prophet ; the words, with few exceptions, are
direct words of God. It is, therefore, easily intelli
gible that it came to be called the word of God (kalam
Allah). But Muslim piety went further and held that
it was uncreated and had existed from all eternity
with God. Whatever proofs of this doctrine may
have been brought forward later from the Qur an it
self, we can have no difficulty in recognizing that it
is plainly derived from the Christian Logos and that
the Greek Church, perhaps through John of Damas
cus, has again played a formative part. So, in cor
respondence with the heavenly and uncreated Logos
in the bosom of the Father, there stands this uncre
ated and eternal Word of God ; to the earthly mani
festation in Jesus corresponds the Qur an, the Word
of God which we read and recite. The one is not the
same as the other, but the idea to be gained from the
expressions of the one is equivalent to the idea which
we would gain from the other, if the veil of the flesh
were removed from us and the spiritual world re
vealed.
That this view grew up very early among the
Muslims is evident from the fact that it is opposed
by Jahm ibn Safwan, who was killed toward the
end of the Umayyad period. It seems to have
originated by a kind of transfusion of ideas from
THE WOKD OF GUI) 147
Christianity and not as a result of controversy or
dialectic about the teachings of the Qur an. We find
the orthodox party vehemently opposing discussion
on the subject, as indeed they did on all theological
subjects. " Our fathers have told us ; it is the faith
received from the Companions ; " was their argument
from the earliest time we can trace. Malik ibn Anas
used to cut off all discussions with " Bila kayfa"
(Believe without asking how) ; and he held strongly
that the Qur an was uncreated. The same word kalam
which we have found applied to the Word of God
both the eternal, uncreated Logos and its manifesta
tion in the Qur an was used by them most conf using-
ly for " disputation ; " "he disputed " was takallam
and " one who disputed " was mutakallim. All that
was anathema to the pious, and it is amusing to see
the origin of what became later the technical terms
for scholastic theology and its students in their
shuddering repulsion to all " talking about " the sacred
mysteries.
This opposition appeared in two forms. First,
they refused to go an inch beyond the statements in
the Qur an and tradition and to draw consequences,
however near the surface these consequences might
seem to lie. A story is told of al-Bukhari, (d. 257),
late as he is, which shows how far this went and how
long it lasted. An inquisition was got up against
him out of envy by one of his fellow- teachers. The
point of attack was the orthodoxy of his position on
the lafz (utterance) of the Qur an ; was it created or
uncreated ? He said readily that the Qur an was un
created and was obstinately silent as to the utterance
148 THEOLOGY
of it by men. At last, persistent questioning drove
him to an outburst. "The Qur an is the Word of
God and is uncreated. The speech of man is created
and inquisition (imtihari) is an innovation (bid a)."
But beyond that he would not go, even to draw the
conclusion of the syllogism which he had indicated.
Some, as we may gather from this story, had felt
themselves driven to hold that not only the Qur an
in itself but also the utterance of it by the lips of
men and the writing of it by men s hands all be
tween the boards, as they said was uncreated.
Others were coming to deny absolutely the existence
of the eternal Logos and that this revealed Qur an
was uncreated in any sense. But others, as al-Bu-
khari, while holding tenaciously that the Qur an was
uncreated, refused to make any statement as to its
utterance by men. There was nothing said about
that in Qur an or tradition.
The second form of opposition was to any uphold
ing of their belief by arguments, except of the sim
plest and most apparent. That was an invasion by
reason (aql) of the realm of traditional faith (naql).
When the pious were eventually driven to dialectic
weapons, their arguments show that these were
snatched up to defend already occupied positions.
They ring artificial and forced. Thus, in the Qur an
itself, the Qur an is called " knowledge from God."
It is, then, inseparable from God s quality of knowl
edge. But that is eternal and uncreated ; therefore,
so too, the Qur an. Again, God created everything
by the word, " Be." But this word cannot have been
created, otherwise a created word would be a creator.
THE WORD OF GOD 149
Therefore, God s word is uncreated. Again, there
stands in the Qur an (vii, 52), "Are not the creation
and the command His ? " The command here is evi
dently different from the creation, i.e., not created.
Further, God s command creates ; therefore it cannot
be created. But it is God s word in command. It
will be noticed here how completely God s word is
hypostatized. This appears still more strongly in
the following argument. God said to Moses, (Qur.
vii, 141), "I have chosen thee over mankind with
my apostolate and my word." God, therefore, has a
word. But, again (Qur. iv, 162), He addresses
Moses with this word (kattama-llahu Musa taklima,
evidently regarded as meaning that God s word ad
dressed Moses) and said, " Lo, I am thy Lord." This
argument is supposed to put the opponent in a di
lemma. Either he rejects the fact of Moses being so
addressed, which is rejecting what God has said, and
is, therefore, unbelief ; or he holds that the Jcalam
which so addresses Moses is a created thing. Then,
a created thing asserts that it is Moses Lord. There
fore, God s Jcalam with which He addresses the proph
ets, or which addresses the prophets, is eternal, un
created.
But if this doctrine grew up early in Islam, op
position to it was not slow in appearing, and that on
different sides. Literary vanity, national pride, and
philosophical scruples all made themselves felt. Even
in Muhammad s lifetime, according to the legend of
the poet Labid and the verses which he put up in
challenge on the Ka ba, the Qur an had taken rank as
inimitable poetry. At all points it was the Word of
150 THEOLOGY
God and perfect in every detail. But, among the
Arabs, a jealous and vain people, if there was one
thing on which each was more jealous and vain than
another, it was skill in working with words. The
superiority of Muhammad as a Prophet of God they
might endure, though often with a bad grace ; but
Muhammad as a rival and unapproachable literary
artist they could not away with. So we find satire of
the weaknesses of the Qur an appearing here and
there, and it came to be a sign of emancipation and
freedom from prejudice to examine it in detail and
balance it against other products of the Arab genius.
The rival productions of Musaylima, the False Proph
et, long enjoyed a semi-contraband existence, and
Abu Ubayda (d. 208) found it necessary to write a
treatise in defence of the metaphors of the Qur an.
Among the Persians this was still more the case. To
them, Muhammad might be a prophet, but he was also
an Arab ; and while they accepted his mission, ac
cepting his books in a literary way was too much for
them. As a prophet, he was a man ; as a literary
artist, he was an Arab. So Jahm ibn Safwan may
have felt; so, certainly, others felt later. The poet
Bashshar ibn Burd (killed for satire, in 167), a com
panion of Wasil ibn Ata and a Persian of very dubi
ous orthodoxy, used to amuse himself by comparing
poems by himself and others with passages in the
Qur an, to the disadvantage of the latter. And Ibn
al-Muqaifa (killed about 140), the translator of " Kalila
and Dimna" and many other books into Arabic, and
a Persian nationalist, is said to have planned an im
itation of the Qur an.
MU TAZILITE ATTITUDE 151
Added to all this came the influence of the Mu tazi-
lite theologians. They had a double ground for their
opposition. The doctrine of an absolutely divine
and perfect book limited them too much in their
intellectual freedom. They were willing to respect
and use the Qur an, but not to accept its ipsissima
verba. Kegarded as the production of Muhammad
under divine influence, it could have a human and a
divine side, and things which needed to be dropped
or changed in it could be ascribed to the human
side. But that was not possible with a miraculous
book come down from heaven. In a word, they were
meeting the difficulty which has been met by Chris
tianity in the latter half of the nineteenth century.
The least they could do was to deny that the Qur an
was uncreated.
But they had a still more vital, if not more im
portant, philosophical base of objection. We have
seen already how they viewed the doctrine of God s
qualities (si/at) and tried to limit them in every way.
These qualities ran danger, they held, of being hy-
postatized into separate persons like those in the
Christian Trinity, and we have just seen how near
that danger really lay in the case of God s Jcalam. In
orthodox Islam it has become a plain Logos.
The position in this of an-Nazzam has been given
above. It is interesting as shoAving that the Qur an,
even then, was given as a probative miracle (mu jiz)
because it deprived all men of power (i jaz) to imitate
it. That is, its aesthetic perfection was raised to the
miraculous degree and then regarded as a proof of
its divine origin. But al-Muzdar, a pupil of Bishr
152 THEOLOGY
ibu al Mu tamir and an ascetic of high rank, called
the Monk of the Mu tazilites, went still further than
an-Nazzam. He flatly damned as unbelievers all who
held the eternity of the Qur an ; they had taken unto
themselves two Gods. Further, he asserted that men
were quite capable of producing a work even finer
than the Qur an in point of style. But the force 6T
this opinion is somewhat diminished by the liberality
with which he denounced his opponents in general as
unbelievers. Stories are told of him very much like
those in circulation with us about those who hold
that few will be saved, and it is worth noticing that
upon this point of salvability the Mu tazilites were
even narrower than the orthodox.
s
\
CHAPTEK II
Al-Ma mun and the triumph of the Mu tazilites ; the Mihna and
Ahmad ibn Hanbal ; al-Farabi ; the Fatimids and the Ikhwan
as-Safa; the early mystics, ascetic and pantheistic; al-Hallaj.
SUCH for long was the situation between the Mu -
tazilites and their orthodox opponents. From time
to time the Mu tazilites received more or less protec
tion and state favor; at other times, they had to
seek safety in hiding. Popular favor they seem
never to have enjoyed. As the Umayyads grew
weak, they became more stiff in their orthodoxy;
but with the Abbasids, and especially with al-Mansur,
thought was again free. As has been shown above,
encouragement of science and research was part of
the plan of that great man, and he easily saw that
the intellectual hope of the future was with these
theological and philosophical questioners. So their
work went slowly on, with a break under Harun ar-
Eashid, a magnificent but highly orthodox monarch,
who understood no trifling with things of the faith.
It is an interesting but useless question whether
Islam could ever have been broadened and devel
oped to the point of enduring in its midst free spec
ulation and research. As the case stands in history,
it has known periods of intellectual life, but only
under the protection of isolated princes here and
there. It has had Augustan ages ; it has never had
153
154 THEOLOGY
great popular yearnings after wider knowledge. Its
intellectual leaders have lived and studied and lect
ured at courts ; they have not gone down and taught
the masses of the people. To that the democracy of
Islam has never come. Hampered by scholastic
snobbishness, it has never learned that the abiding
victories of science are won in the village school.
But most unfortunately for the Mu tazilites and for
Islam, a Khalifa arose who had a relish for theological
discussions and a high opinion of his own infallibil
ity.^. This was al-Ma mun. It did not matter that
he ranged himself on the progressive side ; his fatal
error was that he invoked the authority of the state
in matters of the intellectual and religious life. Thus,
by enabling the conservative party to pose as rqar-
tyrs, he brought the prejudices and passions of jthe
populace still more against the new movement. He
was that most dangerous of all beings, a doctrinaire
despot. He had ideas and tried to make other peo- u
pie live up to them. Al-Mansur, though a bloody
tyrant, had been a great statesman and had known
how to bend people and things quietly to his will.
He had sketched the firm outlines of a policy for the
Abbasids, but had been cautious how he proclaimed
his programme to the world. The world would come
to him in time, and he could afford to wait and work
in the dark. He knew, above all, that no people
would submit to be school-mastered into the way in
which they should go. Al-Ma mun, for all his genius,
was at heart a school-master. He was an enlight
ened patron of an enlightened Islam. Those who
preferred to dwell in the darkness of the obscurant,
AL-MA MUN 155
he first scolded and then punished. Discussions in "
theology and comparative religion were his hobby.
That some such interchange of letters between Mus
lims and Christians as that which crystallized in the
Epistle of al-Kindi took place at his court seems
certain. Bishr al-Marisi, who had lived in hiding in
ar-Eashid s time on account of his heretical views,
disputed, in 209, before al-Ma mun on the nature of
the Qur an. He founded at Baghdad an academy^,
with library, laboratories, and observatory. All the
weight of his influence was thrown on the side of the
Mu tazilites. It appeared as though he were deter
mined to pull his people up by force from their su
perstition and ignorance.
At last, he took the final and fatal step. In 202
a decree appeared proclaiming the doctrine of the
creation of the Qur an as th only truth^ and as bind
ing upon all Muslims. At the same time, as an evi
dent sop to the Persian nationalists and the Alids,
Ali was proclaimed the best of creatures after Mu
hammad. The Alids, it should be remembered, had
close points of contact with the Mu tazilites. Such ,
&lt; a theological decree as this was a new thing in Islam ;
never before had the individual consciousness been
threatened by a word from the throne. The Mu tazi-
lites through it practically became a state church
under erastian control. But the system of Islam
never granted to the Imam, or leader of the Muslim
people, any position but that of a protector and rep
resentative. Its theology could only be formed, as
we have seen in the case of its law, by the agree
ment of the whole community. The question then
156 THEOLOGY
naturally was what effect such a new thing as this
decree could have except to exasperate the orthodox
and the masses. Practically, there was no other
effect. Things went on as before. All that it meant
was that one very prominent Muslim had stated his
opinion and thrown in his lot with heretics.
For six years this continued, and then a method
was devised of bringing the will of the Khalifa home
upon the people. In 217 a distinguished Mu tazilite,
Ahmad ibn Abi Duwad, was appointed chief qadi,
and in 218 the decree was renewed. But this time
it was accompanied by what we would call a test-
act, and an inquisition (mihnd) was instituted. The
letter of directions for the conduct of this matter,
written by al-Ma mun to his lieutenant at Baghdad,
is decisive as to the character of the man and the
nature of the movement. It is full of railings against
the common people who know not the law and are
accursed. They are too stupid to understand phi
losophy or argument. It is the duty of the Khalifa
to guide them and especially to show them the dis
tinction between God and His book. He who holds
otherwise than the Khalifa is either too blind or too
lying and deceitful to be trusted in any other thing.
Therefore, the qadis must be tested as to their
views. If they hold that the Qur an is uncreated,
they have abandoned tawhid, the doctrine of God s
Unity, and can no longer hold office in a Muslim
land. Also, the qadis must apply the same test to
all the witnesses in cases before them. If these do
not hold that the Qur an is created, they cannot be
legal witnesses. Other letters followed ; the Mihha
AHMAD IBN HANBAL 157
was extended through the Abbasid empire and ap
plied to other doctrines, e.g., that of free-will and of
the vision of God. The Khalifa also commanded
that the death penalty for unbelief (kufr) should be
inflicted on those who refused to take the test. They
were to be regarded as idolaters and polytheists.
The death of al-Ma mun in the same year relieved
the pressure. It is true that the Mihna was contin
ued by his successor, al-Mu tasiin, and by his succes
sor, al-Wathiq, but without energy; it was more a
handy political weapon than anything else. In(g34 t
the second year of al-Mutawakkil, it was abolished
and the Qur an decreed uncreated. At the same time
the Alids and all Persian nationalism came under
a ban. Practically, the status quo ante was restored
and Mu tazilism was again left a struggling heresy.
The Arab party and the pure faith of Muhammad
had re-asserted themselves.
In this long conflict, the most prominent figure was
certainly that of Ahmad ibn Hanbal. He was the
trust and strength of the orthodox; that he stood
fast through imprisonment and scourging defeated
the plans of the Mu tazilites. In dealing with the
development of law, we have seen what his legal po
sition was. The same held in theology. Scholastic
theology (kalam) was his abomination. Those who
disputed over doctrines he cast out. That their dog
matic position was the same as his made no differ
ence. For him, theological truth could not be reached
by reasoning (aql) ; tradition (naql) from the fathers
(as-salaf) was the only ground on which the dubious
words of the Qur an could be explained. So, in his
158 THEOLOGY
long examinations before the officials of al-Ma mun
and al-Mu tasim, he contented himself with repeating
either the words of the Qur an which for him were
proofs or such traditions as he accepted. Any ap
proach to drawing a consequence he utterly rejected.
When they argued before him, he kept silence.
What, then, we may ask, was the net result of this
incident? for it was nothing more. The Mu tazilites
dropped back into their former position, but under
changed conditions. The sympathy of the populace
was further from them than ever. Ahmad ibn Han-
bal, saint and ascetic, was the idol of the masses^
and he, in their eyes, had maintained single-handed
the honor of the Word of God. For his persecutors
there was nothing but hatred. And after he had
passed away, the conflict was taken up with still
fiercer bitterness by the school of law founded by his
pupils. They continued to maintain his principles
of Qur an and tradition long after the Mu tazilites
themselves had practically vanished from the scene,
and all that was left for them to contend against was
the modified system of scholastic theology which is
now the orthodox theology of Islam. With these re
actionary Hanbalites we shall have to deal later.
The Mu tazilites, on their side, having seen the
shipwreck of their hopes and the growing storm of
popular disfavor, seem to have turned again to their
scholastic studies. They became more and more the
ologians affecting a narrower circle, and less and less
educators of the world at large. Their system be
came more metaphysical and their conclusions more
unintelligible to the plain man. The fate which has
SCHOOLS OF MU TAZILITES 159
fallen on all continued efforts of the Muslim mind
was coming upon them. Beggarly speculations and
barren hypotheses, combats of words over names,
sapped them of life and reality. What the ill-fated
friendship of al-Ma mun had begun was carried on
and out by the closed circle of Muslim thought.
They separated into schools, one at al -Basra and an-
otKer at Baghdad. At Baghdad the point especially
developed was the old question, What is a thing
(shay) ? They defined a thing, practically, as a con
cept that could be known and of which something
could be said. Existence (ivujud) did not matter.
It was only a quality which could be there or not.
With it, the thing was an entity (maivjud) ; without it,
a non-entity (ma dum), but still a thing with all equip
ment of substance (jaivhar) and accident (arad),
genus and species. The bearing of this was especially
upon the doctrine of creation. Practically, by God s
adding a single quality, things entered the sphere of
existence and ivere for us. Here, then, is evidently
an approach to a doctrine of pre-existent matter. At
al-Basra the relation of God to His qualities was es
pecially discussed, and there it came to be pretty
nearly a family dispute between al-Jubba i (d. 303)
and his son Abu Hashim. Orthodox Islam held that
God has qualities, existent, eternal, added to His es
sence ; thus, He knows, for example, by such a qualit}^
of knowledge. The students of Greek philosophy and
the Shi ites denied this and said that God knew by
His essence. We have seen already Mu tazilite views
as to this point. Abu Hadhayl held that these quali
ties were God s essence and not in it. Thus, He knew
160 THEOLOGY
by a quality of knowledge, but that quality ivas His
essence. Al-Jubba i contented himself with safe
guarding this statement. God knew in accordance
with His essence, but it was neither a quality nor a
state (hal) which required that He should be a
knower. The orthodox had said the first ; his son,
Abu Hashim, said the second. He held that we know
an essence and know it under different conditions.
The conditions varied but the essence remained.
These conditions are not thinkable by themselves,
for we know them only in connection with the es
sence. These are states ; they are different from the
essence, but do not exist apart from it. Al-Jubba i
opposed to this a doctrine that these states were
really subjective in the mind of the perceiver, either
generalizations or relationships existing mentally but
not externally. This controversy spun itself out at
great length through centuries. It eventually re
solved .itself into the fundamental metaphysical in
quiry, What is a thing? A powerful school came to
a conclusion that would have delighted the soul of
Mr. Herbert Spencer. Things are four, they said,
entities, non-entities, states and relationships. As
we have seen above, al-Jubba i denied the reality of
both states and relationships. Orthodox Islam has
been of a divided opinion.
But all this time, other movements had been in
progress, some of which were to be of larger future
importance than this fossilizing intellectualism. In
255 al-Jahiz died. Though commonly reckoned a
Mu tazilite he was really a man of letters, free in
life and thought. He was a maker of books, learned
AL-JAHIZ ; AL-KINDI 161
in the writings of the philosophers and rather in
clined to the doctrines of the Tabi iyun, deistic natu
ralists. His confession of faith was of the utmost
simplicity. He taught that whoever held that God
had neither body nor form, could not be seen with
the eyes, was just and willed no evil deeds, such was
a Muslim in truth. And, further, if anyone was not
capable of philosophical reflection, but held that
Allah was his Lord and that Muhammad was the
Apostle of Allah, he was blameless and nothing more
should be required of him. Here we have evidently
in part a reaction from the subtilties of controversy,
and in part an attempt to broaden theology enough
to give even the unsettled a chance to remain in the
Muslim Church. Something of the same kind we
shall find, later, in the case of Ibn Rushd. Finally,
we have probably to see in his remark that the
Qur an was a body, turned at one time into a man
and at another into a beast, a satirical comment on
the great controversy of his time.
Al-Jahiz may be for us a link with the philosophers
proper, the students of the wisdom of the Greeks.
He represents the stand-point of the educated man
of the time, and was no specialist in anything but
a general scepticism. In the first generation of the
philosophers of Islam, in the narrower sense, stands
conspicuously al-Kindi, commonly called the Philos
opher of the Arabs. The name belongs to him of
right, for he is almost the only example of a student
of Aristotle, sprung from the blood of the desert.
But he was hardly a philosopher in any independent
sense. His role was translating, and during the
162 THEOLOGY
reigns of al-Ma mun and al-Mu tasim a multitude of
translations and original works de omni scibili came
from his hands ; the names of 265 of these have come
down to us. In the orthodox reaction under al-Mu-
tawakkil he fared ill ; his library was confiscated but
afterward restored. He died about 260, and with
him dies the brief, golden century of eager acquisi
tion, and the scholastic period enters in philosophy
as in theology.
That the glory was departing from Baghdad and
the Khalif ate is shown by the second important name
in philosophy. It is that of al-Farabi, who was born
at Farab in Turkestan, lived and worked in the brill
iant circle which gathered round Sayf ad-Dawla, the
Hamdanid, at his court at Aleppo. In music, in
science, in philology, and in philosophy, he was alike
master. Aristotle was his passion, and his Arabic
contemporaries and successors united in calling him
the second teacher, on account of his success in un-
knotting the tangles of the Greek system. It was in
truth a tangled system which came to him, and a
tangled system which he left. The Muslim phi
losophers began, in their innocence, with the follow
ing positions : The Qur an is truth and philosophy is
truth ; but truth can only be one ; therefore, the
Qur an and philosophy must agree. Philosophy they
accepted in whole-hearted faith, as it came to them
from the Greeks through Egypt and Syria. They
took it, not as a mass of more or less contradictory
speculation, but as a form of truth. They, in fact,
never lost a certain theological attitude. Under such
conditions, then, Plato carne to them; but it was
PLATO ; PLOTINUS ; ARISTOTLE 163
mostly Plato as interpreted by Porpliyrius, that is,
as neo-Platonism. Aristotle, too, came to them in
the guise of the later Peripatetic schools. But in
Aristotle, especially, there entered a perfect knot of
entanglement and confusion. During the reign of
al-Mu tasim, a Christian of Emessa in the Lebanon
the history in details is obscure translated parts
of the " Enneads " of Plotiuus into Arabic and en
titled his work "The Theology of Aristotle." A
more unlucky bit of literary mischief and one more
far-reaching in its consequences has never been. The
Muslims took it all as solemnly as they took the text
of the Qur an. These two great masters, Plato and
Aristotle, they said, had expounded the truth, which
is one. Therefore, there must be some way of bring
ing them into agreement. So generations of toilers
labored valiantly with the welter of translations and
pseudographs to get out of them and into them the
one truth. The more pious added the third element
of the Qur an, and it must remain a marvel and a
magnificent testimonial to their skill and patience
that they got even so far as they did and that the
whole movement did not end in simple lunacy. That
al-Earabi should have been so incisive a writer, so
wide a thinker and student; that Ibn Sina should
have been so keen and clear a scientist and logician ;
that Ibn Rushd should have known really known
and commented his Aristotle as he did, shows that
the human brain, after all, is a sane brain and has the
power of unconsciously rejecting and throwing out
nonsense and falsehood.
But it is not wonderful that, dealing with such ma-
164 THEOLOGY
terials and contradictions, they developed a tendency
to mysticism. There were many things which they
felt compelled to hold which could only be defended
and rationalized in that cloudy air and slanting light.
Especially, no one but a mystic could bring together
the emanations of Plotinus, the ideas of Plato, the
spheres of Aristotle and the seven-storied heaven of
Muhammad. With this matter of mysticism we shall
have to deal immediately. Of al-Farabi it is enough
to say that he was one of the most patient of the
laborers at that impossible problem.. It seems never
to have occurred to him, or to any of the others, that
the first and great imperative was to verify his refer
ences and sources. The oriental, like the mediaeval
scholastic, tests minutely the form of his syllogism,
but takes little thought whether his premises state
facts or not. With a scrupulous scepticism in deduc
tion, he combines a childlike acceptance on tradition
or on the narrowest of inductions.
But there are other and more ominous signs in
al-Farabi of the scholastic decline. There appears
first in him that tendency toward the writing of
encyclopaedic compends, which always means super
ficiality and the commonplace. Al-Farabi himself
could not be accused of either, but that he thus
claimed all knowledge for his portion showed the
risk of the premature circle and the small gain. An
other is mysticism. He is a neo-Platonist, more ex
actly a Plotinian ; although he himself would not have
recognized this title. He held, as we have seen, that
he was simply retelling the doctrines of Plato and
Aristotle. But he was also a devout Muslim. He
AL-FAKABI 165
seems to have taken in earnest all the bizarre details
of Muslim cosmography and eschatology ; the Pen,
the Tablet, the Throne, the Angels in all their ranks
and functions mingle picturesquely with the system
of Plotinus, his eV, his tyv%rj, his vovs, his receptive
and active intellects. But to make tenable this posi
tion he had to take the great leap of the mystic.
Unto us these things are impossible ; with God, i.e.,
on another plane of existence, they are the simplest
realities. If the veil were taken from our eyes we
would see them. This has always been the refuge of
the devout Muslim who has tampered with science.
We shall look for it more in detail when we come to
al-Ghazzali, who has put it into classical form.
Again, he was, in modern terms, a monarchist and
a clericalist. His conception of the model state is a
strange compound of the republic of Plato and Shi-
ite dreams of an infallible Imam. Its roots lie, of
course, in the theocratic idea of the Muslim state ;
but his city, which is to take in all mankind, a Holy
Roman Empire and a Holy Catholic Church at once,
a community of saints ruled by sages, shows a later
influence than that of the mother city of Islam, al-
Madina, under Abu Bakr and Umar. The influence
is that of the Fatimids with their capital, al-Mahdiya,
near Tunis. The Hamdanids were Shi ites and Sayf
ad-Dawla, under whom al-Farabi enjoyed peace and
protection, was a vassal of the Fatimid Khalifas.
This brings us again to the great mystery of Mus
lim history. What was the truth of the Fatimid
movement? Was the family of the Prophet the
fosterer of science from the earliest times ? What
166 THEOLOGY
degree of contact had they with the Mu tazilites ?
With the founders of grammar, of alchemy, of law ?
That they were themselves the actual beginners of
everything and everything has been claimed for
them we may put down to legend. But one thing
does stand fast. Just as al-Ma mun combined the
establishment of a great university at Baghdad with
a favoring of the Alids, so the Fatimids in Cairo
erected a great hall of science and threw all their in
fluence and authority into the spreading and extend
ing of knowledge. This institution seems to have
been a combination of free public library and uni
versity, and was probably the gateway connecting
between the inner circle of initiated Fatimid leaders
and the outside, uninitiated world. We have already
seen how unhappy were the external effects of the
Shi ite, and especially of the Fatimid, propaganda
on the Muslim world. But from time to time we be
come aware of a deep undercurrent of scientific and
philosophical labor and investigation accompanying
that propaganda, and striving after knowledge and
truth. It belongs to the life below the surface, which
we can know only through its occasional outbursts.
Some of these are given above ; others will follow.
The whole matter is obscure to the last degree, and
dogmatic statements and explanations are not in
place. It may be that it was only a natural draw
ing together on the part of all the different forces
and movements that were under a ban and had to
live in secrecy and stillness. It may be that the
students of the new sciences passed over, simply
through their studies and political despair as has
IKHWAN-AS-SAFA 167
often happened in our day into different degrees of
nihilism, or, at the other extreme, into a passionate
searching for, and dependence on, some absolute
guide, an infallible Imam. It may be that we have
read wrongly the whole history of the Fatimid move
ment ; that it was in reality a deeply laid and slowly
ripened plan to bring the rule of the world into the
^control of a band of philosophers, whose task it was
to be to rule the human race and gradually to educate
it into self-rule ; that they saw these unknown dev
otees of science and truth no other way of break
ing down the barriers of Islam and setting free the
spirits of men. A wild hypothesis ! But in face of
the real mystery no hypothesis can seem wild.
Closely allied with both al-Farabi and the Fati-
mids is the association known as the Sincere Breth
ren (Ikliwan as-safd). It existed at al-Basra in the
middle of the fourth century of the Hijra during
the breathing space which the free intellectual life
enjoyed after the capture of Baghdad by the Buway-
hids in 334. It will be remembered how that Per
sian dynasty was Shi ite by creed and how it, for the
time, completely clipped the claws of the orthodox
and Sunnite Abbasid Khalifas. The only thing,
thereafter, which heretics and philosophers had to
fear was the enmity of the populace, but that seems
to have been great enough. The Hanbalite mob of
Baghdad had grown to be a thing of terror. It was,
then, an educational campaign on which this new
philosophy had to enter. Their programme was by
means of clubs, propagating themselves and spread
ing over the country from al-Basra and Baghdad, to
168 THEOLOGY
reach all educated people and introduce among them
gradually a complete change in their religious and
scientific ideas. Their teaching was the same combi
nation of neo-Platouic speculation and mysticism
with Aristotelian natural science, wrapped in Mu taz-
ilite theology, that we have already known. Only
there was added to it a Pythagorean reverence for
numbers, and everything, besides, was treated in an
eminently superficial and popularized manner. Our
knowledge of the Fraternity and its objects is based
on its publication, "The Epistles of the Sincere
Brethren " (Rasciil iWiwan as-safa) and upon scanty
historical notices. The Epistles are fifty or fifty-one
in number and cover the field of human knowledge as
then conceived. They form, in fact, an Arabic En
cyclopedic. The founders of the Fraternity, and
authors, presumably, of the Epistles, were at most
ten. We have no certain knowledge that the Fra
ternity ever took even its first step and spread to
Baghdad. Beyond that almost certainly the develop
ment did not pass. The division of members into
four learners, teachers, guides, and drawers near to
God in supernatural vision and the plan of regular
meetings of each circle for study and mutual edifica
tion remained in its paper form. The society was
half a secret one and lacked, apparently, vitality and
energy. There was among its founders no man of
weight and character. So it passed away and has
left only these Epistles which have come down to us
in numerous MSS., showing how eagerly they have
been read and copied and how much influence they
at least must have exercised. That influence must
THE IKHWAN AND THE FATIMIDS 169
have been very mixed. It was, it is true, for intel
lectual life, yet it carried with it in a still higher de
gree the defects we have already noticed in al-Farabi.
To them must be added the most simple skimming
of all real philosophical problems and a treatment of
nature and natural science which had lost all con
nection with facts.
It has been suggested, and the suggestion seems
luminous and fertile, that this Fraternity was simply
a part of the great Fatimid propaganda which, as we
know, honey-combed the ground everywhere under
the Sunnite Abbasids. Descriptions which have
reached us of the methods followed by the leaders of
the Fraternity agree exactly with those of the mis
sionaries of the Isma ilians. They raised difficulties
and suggested serious questionings ; hinted at possi
ble answers but did not give them ; referred to a
source where all questions would be answered.
Again, their catch-words and fixed phrases are the
same as those afterward used by the Assassins, and
we have traces of these Epistles forming a part of
the sacred library of the Assassins. It is to be re
membered that the Assassins were not simply robber
bands who struck terror by their methods. Both the
western and the eastern branches were devoted to
science, and it may be that in their mountain for
tresses there was the most absolute devotion to true
learning that then existed. When the Mongols capt
ured Alamut, they found it rich in MSS. and in
instruments and apparatus of every kind. It is then
possible that the elevated eclecticism of the Ikliwan
as-safa was the real doctrine of the Fatimids, the
170 THEOLOGY
Assassins, the Qarmatians and the Druses ; certainly,
wherever we can test them there is the most singu
lar agreement. It is a mechanical and aesthetic pan
theism, a glorification of Pythagoreanism, with its
music and numbers ; idealistic to the last degree ; a
worship and pursuit of a conception of a harmony
and beauty in all the universe, to find which is to
find and know the Creator Himself. It is thus far
removed from materialism and atheism, but could
easily be misrepresented as both. This, it is true, is
a very different explanation from the one given in
our first Part ; it can only be put along-side of that
and left there. The one expresses the practical
effect of the Isma ilians in Islam; the other what
may have been their ideal. However we judge them,
we must always remember that somewhere in their
teaching, at its best, there was a strange attraction
for thinking and troubled men. Nasir ibn Khusraw,
a Persian Faust, found peace at Cairo between 437
and 444 in recognizing the divine Imamship of al-
Mustansir, and after a life of persecution died in
that faith as a hermit in the mountains of Badakh-
shan in 481. The great Spanish poet, Ibn Hani,
who died in 362, similarly accepted al-Mu izz as his
spiritual chief and guide.
Another eclectic sect, but on a very different prin
ciple, was that of the Karramites, founded by Abu Abd
Allah ibn Karram, who died in 256. Its teachings
had the honor to be accepted and protected by
no less a man than the celebrated Mahmud of Ghazna
(388-421), Mahmud the Idol-breaker, the first in
vader of India and the patron of al-Beruni, Firdawsi,
IBN KAKRAM 171
Ibn Sina and many another. But that, to which we
will return, belongs to a later date and, probably, to
a modified form of Ibn Karram s teaching. For him
self, he was an ascetic of Sijistan and, according to
the story, a man of no education. He lost himself
in theological subtleties which he seems to have
failed to understand. However, out of them all he
put together a book which he called The Punish
ment of the Grave," which spread widely in Khura
san. It was, in part, a frank recoil to the crassest
anthropomorphism. Thus, for him, God actually sat
upon the throne, was in a place, had direction and
so could move from one point to another. He had a
body with flesh, blood, and limbs ; He could be em
braced by those who were purified to the requisite
point. It was a literal acceptance of the material
expressions of the Qur an along with a consideration
of how they could be so, and an explanation by com
parison with men all opposed to the principle bila
Jcayfa. So, apparently, we must understand the
curious fact that he was also a Murji ite and held
faith to be only acknowledgment with the tongue.
All men, except professed apostates, are believers, he
said, because of that primal covenant, taken by God
with the seed of Adam, when He asked, " Am I not
your Lord? " (Alastu bi-rabbikum) and they, brought
forth from Adam s loins for the purpose, made an
swer, " Yea, verily, in this covenant we remain until
we formally cast it off." This, of course, involved
taking God s qualities in the most literal sense. So,
if we are to see in the Mu tazilites scholastic com
mentators trying to reduce Muhammad, the poet, to
172 THEOLOGY
logic and sense, we must see in Ibn Karram one
of those wooden-minded literalists, for whom a meta
phor is a ridiculous lie if it cannot be taken in its
external meaning. He was part of the great stream
of conservative reaction, in which we find also such
a man as Ahmad ibn Hanbal. But the saving salt of
Ahmad s sense and reverence kept him by the "safe
proviso " without considering how and without com
parison." All Ahmad s later followers were not so
wise. In his doctrine of the state Ibn Karram
inclined to the Kharijites.
Before we return to al-Jubba i and the fate of the
Mu tazilites, it remains to trace more precisely the
thread of mysticism, that Jcashf, revelation, which we
have already mentioned several times. Its funda
mental fact is that it had two sides, an ascetic and a
speculative, different in degree, in spirit and in result,
and yet so closely entangled that the same mystic
has been assigned, in good and in bad faith, as an
adherent of both.
It is to the form of mysticism which sprang from
asceticism that we must first turn. Attention has
been given above to the wandering monks and her
mits, the sa ihs (wanderers) and raliibs who caught
Muhammad s attention and respect. We have seen,
too, how Muslim imitators began in their turn to
wander through the land, clad in the coarse woollen
robes which gave them the name of Sufis, and liv
ing upon the alms of the pious. How early these
appeared in any number and as a fixed profession is
uncertain, but we find stories in circulation of meet
ings between such mendicant friars and al-Hasan al-
WOMEN SAINTS 173
Basri himself. Women, too, were among them, and
it is possible that to their influence a development
of devotional love-poetry was due. At least, many
verses of this kind are ascribed to a certain Kabi a,
an ascetic and ecstatic devotee of the most extreme
other-woiidliness, who died in 135. Many other wom
en had part in the contemplative life. Among them
may be mentioned, to show its grasp and spread,
A isha, daughter of Ja far as-Sadiq, who died in 145 ;
Fatima of Naysabur, who died in 223, and the Lady
Nafisa, a contemporary and rival in learning with
ash-Shafi i and the marvel of her time in piety and
the ascetic life. Her grave is one of the most vener
ated spots in Cairo, and at it wonders are still worked
and prayer is always answered. She was a descend
ant of al-Hasan, the martyred ex-Khalifa, and an
example of how the fated family of the Prophet was
an early school for women saints. Even in the
Heathenism we have traces of female penitents and
hermits, and the tragedy of Ali and his sons and de
scendants gave scope for the self-sacrifice, loving ser
vice and religious enthusiasm with which women are
dowered.
All these stood and stand in Islam on exactly
the same footing as men. The distinction in Ro
man Christendom that a woman cannot be a priest
there falls away, for in Islam is neither priest nor
layman. They lived either as solitaries or in conven
tual life exactly as did the men. They were called
by the same terms in feminine form ; they were Sufi-
yas beside the Sufis ; Zahidas (ascetics) beside the
Zahids ; Waliyas (friends of God) beside the Walis ;
174 THEOLOGY
Abidas (devotees) beside the Abids. They worked
wonders (karamat, closely akin to the ^apio-fiara of
1 Cor. xii, 9) by the divine grace, and still, as we
have seen, at their own graves such are granted
through them to the faithful, and their intercession
(shafa a) is invoked. Their religious exercises were
the same; they held dhikrs and women darwishes
yet dance to singing and music in order to bring on
fits of ecstasy. To state the case generally, whatever
is said hereafter of mysticism and its workings
among men must be taken as applying to women
also.
To return : one of the earliest male devotees of
whom we have distinct note is Ibrahim ibn Adham.
He was a wanderer of royal blood, drifted from Balkh
in Afghanistan to al-Basra and to Mecca. He died
in 161. Contempt for the learning of lawyers and
for external forms appears in him ; obedience to God,
contemplation of death, death to the world formed
his teaching. Another, Da ud ibn Nusayr, who died
in 165, was wont to say, " Flee men as thou fleest a
lion. Fast from the world and let the breaking of
thy fast be when thou diest." Another, al-Fudayl
ibn lyad of Khurasan, who died in 187, was a robber
converted by a heavenly voice ; he cast aside the
world, and his utterances show that he lapsed into
the passivity of quietism.
Reference has already been made in the chapter
on jurisprudence to the development of asceticism
which came with the accession of the Abbasids. The
disappointed hopes of the old believers found an out
let in the contemplative life. They withdrew from
PASSAGE OF ASCETICISM TO ECSTASY 175
the world and would have nothing to do with its rul
ers; their wealth and everything connected with
them they regarded as unclean. Ahmad ibn Hanbal
in his later life had to use all his obstinacy and in
genuity to keep free of the court and its contamina
tion. Another was this al-Fudayl. Stories chrono
logically impossible are told how he rebuked Harun
ar-Eashid for his luxury and tyranny and denounced
to his face his manner of life. With such an attitude
to those round him he could have had little joy in his
devotion. So it was said, "When al-Fudayl died,
sadness was removed from the world."
But soon the recoil came. Under the spur of
such exercises and thoughts, the ecstatic oriental
temperament began to revel in expressions borrowed
from human love and earthly wine. Such we find
by Ma ruf of al-Karkh, a district of Baghdad, who
died in 200, and whose tomb, saved by popular
reverence, is one of the few ancient sites in modern
Baghdad ; and by his greater disciple, Sari as-Saqati,
who died in 257. To this last is ascribed, but dubi
ously, the first use of the word taivhid to signify the
union of the soul with God. The figure that the
heart is a mirror to image back God and that it is
darkened by the things of the body appears in Abu
Sulayman of Damascus, who died in 215. A more
celebrated ascetic, who died in 227, Bishr al-Hafi
(bare-foot), speaks of God directly as the Beloved
(kabib). Al-Harith al-Muhasibi was a contemporary
of Ahmad ibn Hanbal and died in 243. The only
thing in him to which Ahmad could take exception
was that he made use of Jcalam in refuting the Mu ta-
176 THEOLOGY
zilites; even this suspicion against him he is said
to have abandoned. Sari and Bishr, too, were close
friends of Ahmad s. Dhu-n-Nun, the Egyptian Sufi,
who died in 245, is in more dubious repute. He is
said to have been the first to formulate the doctrine
of ecstatic states (hals, maqamas) ; but if he went no
further than this, his orthodoxy, in the broad sense,
should be above suspicion. Islam has now come to
accept these as right and fitting. Perhaps the great
est name in early Sufiism is that of al- Juuayd (d. 297) ;
on it no shadow of heresy has ever fallen. He was
a master in theology and law, reverenced as one of
the greatest of the early doctors. Questions of tawliid
he is said to have discussed before his pupils with
shut doors. But this was probably tawliid in the
theological and not in the mystical sense against
the Mu tazilites and not on the union of the soul with
God. Yet he, too, knew the ecstatic life and fell
fainting at verses which struck into his soul. Ash-
Shibli (d. 334) was one of his disciples, but seems to
have given himself more completely to the ascetic
and contemplative life. In verses by him we find the
vocabulary of the amorous intercourse with God fully
developed. The last of this group to be mentioned
here shall be Abu Talib al-Makki, who died in 386.
It is his distinction to have furnished a text-book of
Sufiism that is in use to this day. He wrote and
spoke openly on taivliid, now in the Sufi sense, and
got into trouble as a heretic, but his memory has
been restored to orthodoxy by the general agreement
of Islam. When, in 488, al-Ghazzali set himself to
seek light in Sufiisrn, among the treatises he studied
GROWTH OF FRATERNITIES 177
were the books of four of those mentioned above,
Abu Talib, al-Muhasibi, al- Junayd, and ash-Shibli.
In the case of these and all the others already spoken
of there was nothing but a very simple and natural de
velopment such as could easily be paralleled in Europe.
The earliest Muslims were burdened, as we have seen,
with the fear of the terrors of an avenging God. The
world was evil and fleeting ; the only abiding good
was in the other world ; so their religion became an
ascetic other- worldliness. They fled into the wilder
ness from the wrath to come. "Wandering, either
solitary or in companies, was the special sign of the
true Sufi. The young men gave themselves over to
the guidance of the older men ; little circles of dis
ciples gathered round a venerated Shaykh ; fraterni
ties began to form. So we find it in the case of al-Jun-
ayd, so in that of Sari as-Saqati. Next would come
a monastery, rather a rest-house ; for only in the win
ter and for rest did they remain fixed in a place for
any time. Of such a monastery there is a trace at
Damascus in 150 and in Khurasan about 200. Then,
just as in Europe, begging friars organized them
selves. In faith they were rather conservative than
anything else ; touched with a religious passivism
which easily developed into quietism. Their ecsta
sies went little beyond those, for instance, of Thomas
a Kempis, though struck with a warmer oriental fer
vor.
The points on which the doctors of Islam took
exception to these earlier Sufis are strikingly differ
ent from what we would expect. They concern the
practical life far more than theological speculation.
178 THEOLOGY
As was natural in the case of professional devotees, a
constantly prayerful attitude began to assume impor
tance beside and in contrast to the formal use of the
five daily prayers, the salawat. This development
was in all probability aided by the existence in Syria
of the Christian sect of the Euchites, who exalted
the duty of prayer above all other religious obliga
tions. These, also, abandoned property and obliga
tions and wandered as poor brethren over the country.
They were a branch of Hesychasts, the quietistic
Greek monks who eventually led to the controversy
concerning the uncreated light manifested at the
transfiguration on Mount Tabor and added a doctrine
to the Eastern Church. Considering these points, it
can hardly be doubted that there was some historical
connection and relation here, not only with earlier
but also with later Sufiisin. There is a striking re
semblance between the Sufis seeking by patient intro
spection to see the actual light of God s presence in
their hearts, and the Greek monks in Athos, sitting
solitarily in their cells and seeking the divine light of
Mount Tabor in contemplation of their navels.
But our immediate point is the matter of constant,
free prayer. In the Qur an (xxxiii, 41) the believers
are exhorted to " remember (dhihr) God often ; "
this command the Sufis obeyed with a correlative de
preciation of the five canonical prayers. Their meet
ings for the purpose, much like our own prayer-
meetings, still more like the " class-meetings " of the
early Methodists, as opposed to stated public worship,
were called dhikrs. These services were fiercely
attacked by the orthodox theologians, but survived
TAWAKKUL 179
and are the darwish functions which tourists still go
to see at Constantinople and Cairo. But the more
private and personal dhikrs of individual Sufis, each
in his house repeating his Qur anic litanies through
the night, until to the passer-by it sounded like the
humming of bees or the unceasing drip of roof-gut
ters, these seem, in the course of the third century, to
have fallen before ridicule and accusations of heresy.
Another point against the earlier Sufis was their
abuse of the principle of taivakkul, dependence upon
God. They gave up their trades and professions ;
they even gave up the asking for alms. Their
ideal was to be absolutely at God s disposal, utterly
cast upon His direct sustenance (rizq). No anxiety
for their daily bread was permitted to them ; they
must go through the world separated from it and its
needs and looking up to God. Only one who can do
this is properly an acknowledger of God s unity, a
true Mmvahhid. To such, God would assuredly
open the door of help ; they were at His gate ; and
the biographies of the saints are full of tales how His
help used to come.
To this it may be imagined that the more sober,
even among Sufis, made vehement objection. It fell
under two heads. One was that of Jcasb, the gaining
of daily bread by labor. The examples of the hus
bandman who casts his seed into the ground and then
depends upon God, of the merchant who travels with
his wares in similar trust, were held up against the
wandering but useless monk. As always, traditions
were forged on both sides. Said a man apparently
in a spirit of prophecy one day to the Prophet,
180 THEOLOGY
" Shall I let my camel run free and trust in God ? "
Eeplied the Prophet, or someone for him with a good
imitation of his humorous common-sense, " Tie up
your camel and trust in God." The other head was
the use of remedies in sickness. The whole contro
versy parallels strikingly the " mental science " and
" Christian science " of the present day. Medicine,
it was held, destroyed tawdkkul. In the fourth century
in Persia this insanity ran high and many books were
written for it and against it. The author of one on
the first side was consulted in an obstinate case of
headache. " Put my book under your pillow," he said,
"and trust in God." On both these points the usage
of the Prophet and the Companions was in the teeth
of the Sufi position. They had notoriously earned
their living, honestly or dishonestly, and had pos
sessed all the credulity of semi-civilization toward the
most barbaric and multifarious remedies. So the
agreement of Islam eventually righted itself, though
the question in its intricacies and subtilties remained
for centuries a thing of delight for theologians. In
the end only the wildest fanatics held by absolute
tawakkul.
But all this time the second form of Sufiisrn had
been slowly forcing its way. It was essentially spec
ulative and theological rather than ascetic and de
votional. When it gained the upper hand, zahid
(ascetic) was no longer a convertible term with Sufi.
We pass over the boundary between Thomas a Kempis
and St. Francis to Eckhart and Suso. The roots of
this movement cannot be hard to find in the light of
what has preceded. They lie partly in the neo-
SPECULATIVE SUFIISM 181
Platonism which is the foundation of the philosophy
of Islam. Probably it did not come to the Sufis
along the same channels by which it reached al-
Farabi. It was rather through the Christian mystics
and, perhaps, especially through the Pseudo-Dionys-
ius the Areopagite, and his asserted teacher, Stephen
bar Sudaili with his Syriac " Book of Hierotheos."
We need not here consider whether the Monophysite
heresy is to be reckoned in as one of the results of
the dying neo-Platonism. It is true that outlying
forms of it meant the frank deifying of a man and
thus raised the possibility of the equal deifying of
any other man and of all men. But there is no cer
tainty that these views had an influence in Islam. It
is enough that from A.D. 533 we find the Pseudo-
Dionysius quoted and his influence strong with the
ultra Monophysites, and still more, thereafter, with
the whole mystical movement in Christendom. Ac
cording to it, all is akin in nature to the Absolute,
and all this life below is only a reflection of the
glories of the upper sphere, where God is. Through
the sacraments and a hierarchy of angels man is led
back toward Him. Only in ecstasy can man come to
a knowledge of Him. The Trinity, sin and the
atonement fade out of view. The incarnation is but
an example of how the divine and the human can
join. All is an emanation or an emission of grace
from God ; and the yearnings of man are back to his
source. The revolving spheres, the groaning and
travailing nature are striving to return to their origin.
When this conception had seized the Oriental Church ;
when it had passed into Islam and dominated its
182 THEOLOGY
emotional and religious life ; when through the trans
lation of the Pseudo-Dionysius by Scotus Erigena in
850, it had begun the long contest of idealism in
Europe, the dead school of Plotinus had won the
field, and its influence ruled from the Oxus to the
Atlantic.
But the roots of Sufiism struck also in another
direction. We have already seen an early tendency
to regard Ali and, later, members of his house as in-
incarnations of divinity. In the East, where God
comes near to man, the conception of God in man is
not difficult. The Semitic prophet through whom
God speaks easily slips over into a divine being in
whom God exists and may be worshipped. But if
with one, why not with another? May it not be
possible by purifying exercises to reach this unity ?
If one is a Son of God, may not all become that if
they but take the means? The half -understood pan
theism which always lurks behind oriental fervors
claims its due. From his wild whirling dance, the
darwish, stung to cataleptic ecstasy by the throbbing
of the drums and the lilting chant, sinks back into
the unconsciousness of the divine oneness. He has
passed temporarily from this scene of multiplicity
into the sea of God s unity and, at death, if he but
persevere, he will reach that haven where he fain
would be and will abide there forever. Here, we have
not to do with calm philosophers rearing their sys
tems in labored speculations, but with men, often
untaught, seeking the salvation of their souls ear
nestly and with tears.
One of the earliest of the pantheistic school was
PANTHEISTIC SCHOOL 183
Abu Yazid al-Bistami (d. 261). He was of Persian
parentage, and his father had been a follower of Za-
rathustra. As an ascetic he was of the highest re
pute ; he was also an author of eminence on Sufiism
(al-Ghazzali used his books) and he joined to his
devout learning and self- mortification clear miracu
lous gifts. But equally clear was his pantheistic
drift and his name has come down linked to the say
ing, " Beneath my cloak there is naught else than
God." It is worth noticing that certain other of his
sayings show that, even in his time, there were Sufi
saints who boasted that they had reached such per
fection and such miraculous powers that the ordinary
moral and ceremonial law no longer applied to them.
The antinomianism which haunted the later Sufiism
and darwishdom had already appeared.
But the greatest name of all among these early
pantheists was that of al-Hallaj (the cotton carder),
a pupil of al-Junayd, who was put to death with great
cruelty in 309. It is almost impossible to reach any
certain conclusion as to his real views and aims. In
spite of what seem to be utterances of the crassest
pantheism, such as, "I am the Truth," there have
not been wanting many in later Islam who have
reverenced his memory as that of a saint and martyr.
To Sufis and darwishes of his time and to this day
he has been and is a patron saint. In his life and
death he represents for them the spirit of revolt against
dogmatic scholasticism and formalism. Further, even
such a great doctor of the Muslim Church as al-Ghazzali
defended him and, though lamenting some incautious
phrases, upheld his orthodoxy. At his trial itself
184 THEOLOGY
before the theologians of Baghdad, one of them re
fused to sign the fatwa declaring him an unbeliever ;
he was not clear, he said, as to the case. And it is
true that such records as we have of the time suggest
that his condemnation was forced by the government
as a matter of state policy. He was a Persian of
Magian origin, and evidently an advanced mystic of
the speculative type. He carried the theory to its
legitimate conclusion, and proclaimed the result pub
licly. He dabbled in scholastic theology ; had evi
dent Mu tazilite leanings; wrote on alchemy and
things esoteric. But with this mystical enthusiasm
there seem to have united in him other and more
dangerous traits. The stories which have reached
us show him of a character fond of excitement and
change, surrounding himself with devoted adherents
and striving by miracle-working of a commonplace
kind to add to his following. His popularity among
the people of Baghdad and their reverence for
him rose to a perilous degree. He may have had
plans of his own as a Persian nationalist; he may
have had part in one of the Shi ite conspiracies ; he
may have been nothing but a rather weak-headed
devotee, carried off his feet by a sudden tide of public
excitement, the greatest trial and danger that a saint
has to meet. But the times were not such then in
Baghdad that the government could take any risks.
Al-Muqtadir was Khalifa and in his weak hands the
Khalifate was slipping to ruin. The Fatimids were
supreme in North Africa ; the Qarmatians held Syria
and Arabia, and were threatening Baghdad itself. In
eight years they were to take Mecca. Persia was
AL-HALLAJ 185
seething with false prophets and nationalists of every
shade. Thirteen years later Ibn ash-Shalmaghani
was put to death in Baghdad on similar grounds ; in
his case, Shi ite conspiracy against the state was still
more clearly involved. We can only conclude in the
words of Ibn Khallikan (d. 681), " The history of al-
Hallaj is long to relate ; his fate is well known ; and
God knoweth all secret things." With him we must
leave, for the present, consideration of the Sufi devel
opment and return to the Mu tazilites and to the
people tiring of their dry subtilties.
CHAPTEK III
The rise of orthodox kalam; al-Ash ari ; decline of the Mu tazil-
ites ; passing of heresy into unbelief ; development of scho
lastic theology by Ash arites ; rise of Zahirite kalam; Ibn
Hazm ; persecution of Ash arites ; final assimilation of kalam.
As we have already seen, the traditionalist party at
first refused to enter upon any discussion of sacred
things. Malik ibn Anas used to say, " God s istiiva
(settling Himself firmly upon His throne) is known ;
how it is done is unknown ; it must be believed ;
questions about it are an innovation (bid 1 a}." But
such a position could not be held for any length of
time. The world cannot be cut in two and half as
signed to faith and half to reason. So, as time went
on, there arose on the orthodox side men who, little
by little, were prepared to give a reason for the faith
that was in them. They thus came to use kalam in
order to meet the kalam of the Mu tazilites ; they
became mutakallims, and the scholastic theology of
Islam was founded. It is the history of this transfer
of method which we have now to consider.
Its beginnings are wrapped in a natural obscurity.
It was at first a gradual, unconscious drift, and peo
ple did not recognize its existence. Afterward, when
they looked back upon it, the tendency of the human
mind to ascribe broad movements to single men as
serted itself and the whole was put under the name
186
EISE OF ORTHODOX KALAM 187
of al-Ash ari. It is true that with him, in a sense, the
change suddenly leaped to self-consciousness, but it
had already been long in progress. As we have seen,
al-Junayd discussed the unity of God, but it was be
hind closed doors. Ash-Shan i held that there should
be a certain number of men trained thus to defend
and purify the faith, but that it would be a great
evil if their arguments should become known to the
mass of the people. Al-Muhasibi, a contemporary
of Ahmad ibn Hanbal, was suspected, and rightly, of
defending his faith with argument, and thereby in
curred Ahmad s displeasure. Another contemporary
of Ahmad s, al-Karabisi (d. 345), incurred the same
displeasure, and the list might easily be extended.
But the most significant fact of all is that the move
ment came to the surface and showed itself openly at
the same time in the most widely separated lands of
Islam. In Mesopotamia there was al-Ash ari, who
died after 320 ; in Egypt there was at-Tahawi, who
died in 331; in Samarqand there was al-Mataridi,
who died in 333. Of these at-Tahawi is now little
more than a name ; al-Mataridi s star has paled be
fore that of al-Ash ari ; al-Ash ari has come in popular
view to be the solitary hero before whom the Mu taz-
ilite system went down. It will perhaps be sufficient
if we take his life and experiences as our guide in
this period of change ; the others must have followed
very much in the same path.
He was born at al-Basra in 260, the year in which
al-Kindi died and Muhammad al-Muntazar vanished
from the sight of men. He came into a world full of
intellectual ferment ; Alids of different camps were
188 THEOLOGY
active in their claim to be possessors of an infallible
Imam ; Zaydites and Qarmatians were in revolt ; the
decree of 234 that the Qur an was uncreated had had
little effect, so far, in silencing the Mu tazilites ; in
261 the Sufi pantheist, Abu Yazid, died. Al-Ash ari
himself was of the best blood of the desert and of a
highly orthodox family which had borne a distin
guished part in Muslim history. Through some ac
cident he came in early youth into the care of al-
Jubba i, the Mu tazilite, who, according to one story,
had married al-Ash ari s mother ; was brought up by
him and remained a stanch Mu tazilite, writing and
speaking on that side, till he was forty years old.
Then a strange thing happened. One day he mounted
the pulpit of the mosque in al-Basra and cried aloud,
" He who knows me, knows me ; and he who knows
me not, let him know that I am so and so, the son of
so and so. I have maintained the creation of the
Qur an and that God will not be seen in the world to
come with the eyes, and that the creatures create their
actions. Lo, I repent that I have been a Mu tazilite
and turn to opposition to them." It was a voice full
of omen. It told that the intellectual supremacy of
the Mu tazilites had publicly passed and that, here
after, they would be met with their own weapons.
What led to this change of mind is strictly unknown ;
only legends have reached us. One, full of psycho
logical truth, runs that one Ramadan, the fasting
month, when he was worn with prayer and hunger,
the Prophet appeared to him three times in his sleep,
and commanded him to turn from his vain kalam and
seek certainty in the traditions and the Qur an. If
RETURN OF AL-ASH { ARI 189
lie would but give himself to that study, God would
make clear the difficulties and enable him to solve all
the puzzles. He did so, and his mind seemed to be
opened ; the old contradictions and absurdities had
fled, and he cursed the Mu tazilites and all their
works.
It can easily be seen that in some such way as
this the blood of the race may have led him back
to the God of his fathers, the God of the desert,
whose word must be accepted as its own proof. The
gossips of the time told strange tales of rich relatives
and family pressure ; we can leave these aside. When
he had changed he was terribly in earnest. He met
his old teacher, al-Jubba i, in public discussions again
and again till the old man withdrew. One of these
discussions legend has handed down in varying forms.
None of them may be exactly true, but they are sig
nificant of the change of attitude. He came to al-
Jubba i and said, " Suppose the case of three brothers ;
one being God-fearing, another godless and a third
dies as a child. What of them in the world to come ? "
Al-Jubba i replied, " The first will be rewarded in
Paradise ; the second punished in Hell, and the third
will be neither rewarded nor punished." Al-Ash ari
continued, "But if the third said, Lord, Thou
mightest have granted me life, and then I would have
been pious and entered Paradise like my brother,
what then?" Al-Jubba i replied, " God would say,
I knew that if thou wert granted life thou wouldst
be godless and unbelieving and enter Hell. " Then
al-Ash ari drew his noose, " But what if the second
said, Lord, why didst Thou not make me die as a
190 THEOLOGY
child? Then had I escaped Hell. " Al-Jubba i
was silenced, and Al-Ash ari went away in triumph.
Three years after his pupil had left him the old man
lied. The tellers of this story regard it as disproving
the Mu tazilite doctrine of "the best" al-aslah
namely, that God is constrained to do that which may
be best and happiest for His creatures. Orthodox
Islam, as we have seen, holds that God is under no
such constraint, and is free to do good or evil as He
chooses.
But the story has also another and somewhat
broader significance. It is a protest against the
religious rationalism of the Mu tazilites, which held
that the mysteries of the universe could be expressed
and met in terms of human thought. In this way
it represents the essence of al-Ash ari s position, a
recoil from the impossible task of raising a system
of purely rationalistic theology to reliance upon the
Word of God, and the tradition (hadith) and usage
(sunnd) of the Prophet and the pattern of the early
church (salaf).
The stories told above represent the change as
sudden. According to the evidence of his books
that was not so. In his return there were two
stages. In the first of these he upheld the seven
rational Qualities (sifat aqliya] of God, Life, Knowl
edge, Power, Will, Hearing, Seeing, Speech : but ex
plained away the Qur anic anthropomorphisms of
God s face, hands, feet, etc. In the second stage,
which fell, apparently, after he had moved to Bagh
dad and come under the strong Hanbalite influences
there, he explained away nothing, but contented him-
191
self with the position that the anthropomorphisms
were to be taken, bila kayfa ivalatashbih, without ask
ing how and without drawing any comparison. The
first phrase is directed against the Mu tazilites, who
inquired persistently into the nature and possibility
of such things in God ; the second, against the an-
thropomorphists (mushabbihs, comparers ; mujassims,
corporealizers), mostly ultra Hanbalites and Kar-
ramites, who said that these things in God were like
the corresponding things in men. At all stages, how
ever, he was prepared to defend his conclusions and
assail those of his adversaries by dint of argument.
The details of his system will be best understood by
reading his creed and the creed of al-Fudali, which is
essentially Ash arite. Both are in the Appendix of
Translated Creeds. Here, it is necessary to draw
attention to two, only, of the obscurer points. On
the vexed question, " What is a thing ? " he antici
pated Kant. The early theologians, orthodox and
theoretical, and those later ones also who did not fol
low him, regarded, as we have seen, existence (wujud)
as only one of the qualities belonging to an existing
thing (maivjucF). It was there all the time, but it
lacked the quality of " existence " ; then that quality
was added to its other qualities and it became exist
ent. But al-Ash ari and his followers held that ex
istence was the " self " (ayri) of the e.ntity and not a
quality or state, however personal or necessary. See,
on the whole, Appendix of Creeds.
On the other vexed question of free-will, or, rather,
as the Muslims chose to express it, on the ability of
men to produce actions, he took up a mediating po-
192 THE- .OGY
sition. The old orthodox position was absolutely
fatalistic ; the Mu tazilites, following their principle
of Justice, gave to man an initiative power. Al-
Ash ari struck a middle path. {(Man cannot create
anything ; God is the only creator. Nor does man s
power produce any effect on his actions at all. God
creates in His creature power (qudra) and choice
(ikhtiyar). Then He creates in him his action cor
responding to the power and choice thus created.
So the action of the creature is created by God as
to initiative and as to production ; but it is acquired
by the creature. By acquisition (kasb) is meant that
it corresponds to the creature s power and choice,
previously created in him, without his having had
the slightest effect on the action. He was only the
locus or subject of the action. In this way al-Ash ari
is supposed to have accounted for free-will and
entailed responsibility upon men. It may be doubted
whether the second point occupied him much. It
was open to his God to do good or evil as He chose ;
the Justice of the Mu tazilites was left behind. He
may have intended only to explain the consciousness
of freedom, as some have done more recently. The
closeness with which al-Ash ari in this comes to the
pre-established harmony of Leibnitz and to the
Kantian conception of existence shows how high a
rank he must take as an original thinker. His
abandoning of the Mu tazilites was due to no mere
wave of sentiment but to a perception that their spec-_
ulations were on too narrow a basis and of a too bar
ren scholastic type. He died after 320 with a curse
on them and their methods as his last words.
AL-MATAKIDI 193
A few words only need be given to al-Mataridi.
The creed of an-Nasafi in the Appendix of Creeds, pp.
308-315 belongs to his school. He and at-Tahawi
were followers of the broad-minded Abu Hanifa, who
was more than suspected of Mu tazilite and Murji ite
leanings. Muslim theologians usually reckon up
some thirteen points of difference between al-Mata
ridi and al-Ash ari and admit that seven of these are
not much more than combats of words. Those
which occur in an-Nasafi s creed are marked with a
star.
We are now in a position to finish shortly with the
Mu tazilites. Their work, as a constructive force, is
done. From this time on there is kalam among the
orthodox, and the term mutakallim denotes nothing
but a scholastic theologian, whether of one wing or
another. And so, like any other organ which has done
its part and for the existence of which there is no
longer any object, they gradually and quietly dropped
into the background. They had still, sometimes, to
suffer persecution, and for hundreds of years there
were men who continued to call themselves Mu tazil-
ites ; but their heresies came to be heresies of the
schools and not burning questions in the eyes of
the masses. We need now draw attention to only a
few incidents and figures in this dying movement.
The Muslim historians lay much stress on the ortho
dox zeal of the Khalifa al-Qadir, who reigned 381-
422, and narrate how he persecuted the Mu tazilites,
Shi ites and other heretics and compelled them, under
oath, to conform.
But there are several difficulties in the way of this
194 THEOLOGY
persecution, which make it probable that it was more
nominal than otherwise. Al-Qadir was bitterly or
thodox ; he had written a treatise on theology and
compelled his unhappy courtiers to listen to a public
reading of it every week. But he enjoyed, outside
of his palace, next to no power. He was in the con
trol of the Shi ite Buwayhids, who, as we have seen,
ruled Baghdad and the Khalifate from 320 to 447.
These dubious persecutions are said to have fallen in
408 and 420. Again, a Muslim pilgrim from Spain
visited Baghdad about 390 and has left us a record
of the state of religious things there. He found in
session what may perhaps best be described as a
Parliament of Religions. It seems to have been a
free debate between Muslims of all sects, orthodox
and heretical, Parsees and atheists, Jews and Chris
tians unbelievers of every kind. Each party had a
spokesman, and at the beginning of the proceedings
the rule was rehearsed that no one might appeal to
the sacred books of his creed but might only adduce
arguments founded upon reason. The pious Spanish
Muslim went to two meetings but did not peril his
soul by any further visits. In his narrative we rec
ognize the horror with which the orthodox of Spain
viewed such proceedings Spain, Muslim and Chris
tian, has always favored the straitest sect ; but when
such a thing was permitted in Baghdad, religious lib
erty there at least must have been tolerably broad.
Possibly it was sittings of the Iklnvan as- sofa upon
which this scandalized Spaniard stumbled. He him
self speaks of them as meetings of mutakallims.
But if the mixture of Sunnite and Shi ite authority
MAHMUD OF GHAZNA 195
in Baghdad gave all the miscellaneous heretics a
chance for life, it was different in the growing domin
ions of Mahmud of Ghazna. That iconoclastic mon
arch had embraced the anthropomorphic faith of the
Karramites, the most literal-minded of all the Mus
lim sects. In consequence, all forms of Mu tazilism
and all kinds of mutakallims were an abomination
to him, and it was a very real persecution which they
met at his hands. That al-Qadir, his spiritual suze
rain, urged him on is very probable ; it is also possi
ble that respect for the growing power of Mahmud
may have protected al-Qadir to some extent from the
Buwayhids. In 420 Mahmud took from them Ispa
han and held there a grand inquisition on Shi ites and
heretics of all kinds.
To proceed with the Mu tazilites ; when we come
to al-Ghazzali and his times we shall find that they
have ceased to be a crying danger to the faith.
Though their views might, that doctor held, be er
roneous in some respects, they were not to be con
sidered as damnable. Again, in 538, there died az-
Zamakhshari, the great grammarian, who is often
called the last of the Mu tazilites. He was not that
by any means, but his heresies were either mild or
werejregarded mildly. A single point will show this,
His commentary on the Qur an, the Kaslisliaf, was re
vised and expurgated in the orthodox interest by
al-Baydawi (d. 688) and in that form is now the
most popular and respected of all expositions. The
Kashshaf itself , in its original, unmodified form, has
been printed several times at Cairo. Again, Ibn
Rttshd, the Aristotelian, who died in 595, when he is
196 THEOLOGY
combating the arguments of the mutakallims, makes
little difference between the Mu tazilites and the
others. They are only, to him, another variety of
scholastic theologian, with a rather better idea, per
haps, of logic and argument. He considered, as we
shall find later, all the mutakallims as sadly to seek
in such matters. Since then, and into quite modern
times, there have been sporadic cases of theologians
called Mu tazilites by themselves or others. Practi
cally, they have been scholastics of eccentric views.
Finally, the use of this name for themselves by the
present-day broad school Muslims of India is abso
lutely unhistorical and highly misleading.
We turn now to suggest, rather than to trace, some
of the non-theological consequences of the preceding
theology.
Increasingly, from this time on, it is not heresy
which has to be met so much as simple unbelief, more
or less frank. It is evident that the heretics of the
earlier period are now dividing in two directions,
one part inclining toward milder forms of heresy and
the other toward doubt in the largest sense, passing
over to Aristotelian + neo-Platonic philosophy, and
thence dividing into materialists, deists, and theists.
Thus we have seen earlier the workings of al-Farabi
and of the Ikhwan as-safa. The teachings of the
latter pass on to the Isma ilians who developed them
in the mountain fortresses, the centres of their power,
scattered from Persia to Syria. These were other
wise called Assassins ; otherwise Batinites in the
narrower sense in the broader that term meant only
those who found under the letter of the Qur an a
AL-BERUNI J IBN SINA 197
bidden, esoteric meaning; otherwise Ta limites or
claimers of a ta lim, a secret teaching by a divinely
instructed Imam, and with them we shall have much
to do later. It is sufficient here to notice how the
peaceful and rather watery philosophy of the "Sin
cere Brethren" was transmuted through ambition
and fanaticism into belligerent politics at the hands
and daggers of these fierce sectaries. Into this period,
too, fall some well-known names of dubious and more
than dubious orthodoxy. Al-Beruni (d. 440) even
at the court of Mahrnud of Ghazna managed to keep
his footing and his head. Yet it may be doubted how
far he was a Karramite or even a Muslim. He was
certainly the first scientific student of India and In-
dica and of chronology and calendars, a man whose
attainments and results show that our so-called
modern methods are as old as genius. On religion,
he maintained a prudent silence, but earned the favor
of Mahmud by an unsparing exposure of the weak
ness in the Fatimid genealogy. In this sketch he
has a place as a man of science who went his own way
without treading on the religious toes of other people.
His contemporary Ibn Sina (d. 428), for us Avi-
cenna, was of a different nature, and his lines were
cast in different places. He was a wanderer through
the courts of northern Persia. The orthodox and
stringent Mahmud he carefully avoided; the Buway-
hids and those of their ilk took such heresies as his
more easily. Endowed with a gigantic memory and
an insatiable intellectual appetite, he was the ency
clopaedist of his age, and his scientific work, and
especially that in medicine, went further than any-
198 THEOLOGY
thing else to put the Muslim East and mediaeval
Europe in the strait waistcoat from which the first
has not yet emerged and the second only shook itself
free in the seventeenth century. He was a student
of Aristotle and a mystic, as all Muslim students of
Aristotle have been. How far his mysticism enabled
him to square the Qur an with his philosophy is not
clear ; such men seldom said exactly what they meant
and all that they thought. He was also a diligent
student and reader of the Qur an and faithful in his
public religious duties. Yet the Muslim world asserts
that he left behind him a testamentary tractate (ivas-
iya) defending dissimulation as to the religion of the
country in which we might be ; that it was not wrong
for the philosopher to go through religious rites
which for him had no meaning. He, too, is signifi
cant for his time, and, if our interest were philosophy,
would call for lengthened treatment. As it is, he
marks for us the accomplished separation between
students of theology and students of philosophy.
An equally well known and by us much better loved
name is that of Umar al-Khayyam, who died later,
about 515, but who may fitly be grouped with Ibn
Sina. He, too, was a bon vivant, but of a deeper,
more melancholy strain. His wine meant more than
friendly cups ; it was a way of escape from the world
and its burden. His science, too, went deeper. He
was not a gatherer and arranger of the wisdom of the
past ; his reformed calendar is more perfect than that
Avhich we even now use. His faith is a riddle to us,
as it was to his comrades. But it was because he
had no certain truth to proclaim that Umar did not
ABU-L-ALA AL-MA AREI 199
speak out clearly. His last words were almost those
of Rabelais, " I go to meet the great Perhaps."
Anecdotage connects his name with that of al-Ghaz-
zali. Neither had escaped the pall of universal
scepticism which must have descended upon their
time. But al-Ghazzali, by God s grace, as he himself
reverently says, was enabled to escape. Umar died
under it.
A very different man was Abu-1-Ala al-Ma c arri,
the blind poet and singer of intellectual freedom.
In Arabic literature there is no other voice like
his, clear and confident. He was a man of letters ;
no philosopher nor theologian nor scientist, though
at one time he seems to have come in contact with a
circle like that of Ikhwan as-safa, perhaps the same ;
and his spirit was like that of one of the heroic poets
of the old desert life, whose hand was taught to keep
his head, whose tongue spared nothing from heaven
to earth, and who lived his own life out in his own
way, undaunted. In his darkness he nourished great
thoughts and flung out a sceva indignatio on hypocrisy
and subservience which reminds of Lessing. But
Abu-1-Ala was a great poet, and his scorn of
priests and courtiers and their lies, his pity for suf
fering humanity and his confidence in the light of
reason are thrown into scraps of burning, echoing
verse without their like in Arabic. He died at the
town of his birth, Ma arrat au-Nu man, in northern
Syria, in 449. The problem is how he was suffered
to live out his long life of eighty-six years.
We can now return to the development of scholas
tic theology in the orthodox church at the hands of
200 THEOLOGY
the followers of al-Ash ari. They had to fight their
way against many and most differing opponents. At
the one extreme were the dwindling Mu tazilites,
passing slowly into comparatively innocuous heretics,
and the growing party of unbelievers, philosophical
and otherwise, open and secret. At the other ex
treme was the mob of Hanbalites, belonging to the
only legal school which laid theological burdens on
its adherents. The theologians, in this case, cer
tainly varied as to the weight of their own anathemas
against all kalam, but were at one in that they carried
the bulk of the multitude with them and could en
force their conclusions with the cudgels of rioters.
In the midst were the rival orthodox (pace the Han
balites) developers of kalam, among whom the Ma-
taridites probably held the most important place.
Thus, the Ash arite school was the nursling as well as
the child of controversy.
It was, then, fitting that the name joined, at least
in tradition, with the final form of that system, should
be that of a controversialist. But this man, Abu
Bakr al-Baqilani the Qadi, was more than a mere con
troversialist. It is his glory to have contributed most
important elements to and put into fixed form what
is, perhaps, the most fantastic and daring meta
physical scheme, and almost certainly the most thor
ough theological scheme, ever thought out. On the
one hand, the Lucretian atoms raining down through
the empty void, the self-developing monads of Leib
nitz, pre-established harmony and all, the Kantian
" things in themselves " are lame and impotent in
their consistency beside the parallel Ash arite doc-
ASH ARITE METAPHYSICS 201
trines ; and, on the other, not even the rigors of Cal
vin, as developed in the Dutch confessions, can com
pete with the unflinching exactitude of the Muslim
conclusions.
First, as to ontology. The object of the Ash arites
was that of Kant, to fix the relation of knowledge to
the thing in itself. Thus, al-Baqilani defined knowl
edge (Urn) as cognition (ma rifa) of a thing as it is in
itself. But in reaching that " thing in itself " they
were much more thorough than Kant. Only two of
the Aristotelian categories survived their attack, sub
stance and quality. The others, quantity, place, time
and the rest, were only relationships (i tibars) exist
ing subjectively in the mind of the knower, and not
things. But a relationship, they argued, if real, must
exist in something, and a quality cannot exist in
another quality, only in a substance. Yet it could
not exist in either of the two things which it brought
together ; for example, in the cause or the effect. It
must be in a third thing. But to bring this third
thing and the first two together, other relationships
would be needed and other things for these relation
ships to exist in. Thus we would be led back in an
infinite sequence, and they had taken over from Aris
totle the position that such an infinite series backward
(tasalsal) is inadmissible. Belationships, then, had
no real existence but were mere phantoms, subjective
nonentities. Further, the Aristotelian view of matter
was now impossible for them. All the categories
had gone except substance and quality ; and among
them, passion. Matter, then, could not have the pos
sibility of suffering the impress of form. A possibil-
202 THEOLOGY
ity is neither an entity nor a non-entity, but a sub
jectivity purely. But with the suffering matter, the
active form and all causes must also go. They, too,
are mere subjectivities. Again, qualities, for these
thinkers, became mere accidents. The fleeting char
acter of appearances drove them to the conclusion
that there was no such thing as a quality planted in
the nature of a thing ; that the idea " nature " did not
exist. Then this drove them further. Substances ex
ist only with qualities, i.e., accidents. These quali
ties may be positive or they may be negative ; the
ascription to things of negative qualities is one of
their most fruitful conceptions. When, then, the
qualities fall out of existence, the substances them
selves must also cease to exist. Substance as well as
quality is fleeting, has only a moment s duration.
But when they rejected the Aristotelian view of
matter as the possibility of receiving form, their path
of necessity led them straight to the atomists. So
atomists they became, and, as always, after their own
fashion. Their atoms are not of sp ice only, but also
of time. The basis of all the manifestation, mental
and physical, of the world in place and time, is a
multitude of monads. Each has certain qualities but
has extension neither in space nor time. They have
simply position, not bulk, and do not touch one
another. Between them is absolute void. Similarly
as to time. The time-atoms, if the expression may
be permitted, are equally unextended and have also
absolute void of time between them. Just as
space is only in a series of atoms, so time is only in
a succession of untouching moments and leaps across
ASH ARITE THEOLOGY 203
the void from one to the other with the jerk of the
hand of a clock. Time, in this view, is in grains and
can exist only in connection with change. The mon
ads differ from those of Leibnitz in having no nature
in themselves, no possibility of development along
certain lines. The Muslim monads are, and again
are not, all change and action in the world are pro
duced by their entering into existence and dropping
out again, not by any change in themselves.
But this most simple view of the world left its
holders in precisely the same difficulty, only in a far
higher degree, as that of Leibnitz. He was com
pelled to fall back on a pre-established harmony to
bring his monads into orderly relations with one
another; the Muslim theologians, on their side, fell
back upon God and found in His will the ground of
all things.
We here pass from their ontology to their theology,
and as they were thorough-going metaphysicians, so
now they are thorough-going theologians. Being
was all in the one case ; now it is God that is all. In
truth, their philosophy is in its essence a scepticism
which destroys the possibility of a philosophy in
order to drive men back to God and His revelations
and compel them to see in Him the one grand fact
of the universe. So, when a darwish shouts in his
ecstasy, " Huwa-l-liaqq" he does not mean, "He is the
Truth," in our Western sense of Verity, or our New
Testament sense of " The Way, the Truth, and the
Life," but simply, "He is the Fact " the one Ke-
ality.
To return: from their ontology they derived an
204 THEOLOGY
argument for the necessity of a God. That their
monads came so and not otherwise must have a cause ;
without it there could be no harmony or connec
tion between them. And this cause must be one
with no cause behind it ; otherwise we would have
the endless chain. This cause, then, they found in
the absolutely free will of God, working without any
matter beside it and unaffected by any laws or neces
sities. It creates and annihilates the atoms and their
qualities and, by that means, brings to pass all the
motion and change of the world. These, in our sense,
do not exist. When a thing seems to us to be moved,
that really means that God has annihilated or per
mitted to drop out of existence, by not continuing to
uphold, as another view held the atoms making up
that thing in its original position, and has created
them again and again along the line over which it
moves. Similarly of what we regard as cause and
effect. A man writes with a pen and a piece of paper.
God creates in his mind the will to write ; at the same
moment he gives him the power to write and brings
about the apparent motion of the hand, of the pen
and the appearance on the paper. No one of these
is the cause of the other. God has brought about by
creation and annihilation of atoms the requisite com
bination to produce these appearances. Thus we see
that free-will for the Muslim scholastics is simply the
presence, in the mind of the man, of this choice cre
ated there by God. This may not seem to us to be
very real, but it has, certainly, as much reality as
anything else in their world. Further, it will be ob
served how completely this annihilates the machinery
ETHICAL CONSEQUENCES 205
of the universe. There is no such thing as law, and
the world is sustained by a constant, ever-repeated
miracle. Miracles and what we regard as the ordi
nary operations of nature are on the same level.
The world and the things in it could have been quite
different. The only limitation upon God is that He
cannot produce a contradiction. A thing cannot be
and not be at the same time. There is no such thing
as a secondary cause ; when there is the appearance
of such, it is only illusions!. God is producing it as
well as the ultimate appearance of effect. There is
no nature belonging to things. Fire does not burn
and a knife does not cut. God creates in a substance
a being burned when the fire touches it and a being
cut when the knife approaches it.
In this scheme there are certainly grave difficul
ties, philosophical and ethical. It establishes a rela
tionship between God and the atoms ; but we have
already seen that relationships are subjective illu
sions. That, however, was in the case of the things
of the world, perceived by the senses contingent
being, as they would put it. It does not hold of
necessary being. God possesses a quality called
Difference from originated things (al-muklialafa lil-
liaivadith). He is not a natural cause, but a free
cause ; and the existence of a free cause they were
compelled by their principles to admit. The ethical
difficulty is perhaps greater. If there is no order of
nature and no certainty, or nexus, as to causes and
effects; if there is no regular development in the
life, mental, moral, and physical of a man only a
series of isolated moments ; how can there be any
206 THEOLOGY
responsibility, any moral claim or duty ? This diffi
culty seems to have been recognized more clearly
than the philosophical one. It was met formally by
the assertion of a certain order and regularity in the
will of God. He sees to it that a man s life is a
unity, and, for details, that the will to eat and the
action always coincide. But such an answer must
have been felt to be inadequate and to involve
grave moral dangers for the common mind. There
fore, as we have seen, the study of kalam was hedged
about with difficulties and restrictions. Theologians
recognized its trap- falls and doubts, even for them
selves, and lamented that they were compelled by
their profession to study it. The public discussion
of its questions was regarded as a breach of profes
sional etiquette. Theologians and philosophers alike
strove to keep these deeper mysteries hidden from
the multitude. The gap between the highly edu
cated and the great mass that fundamental error and
greatest danger in Muslim society comes here again
to view. Further, even among theologians, there
was some difference in degree of insight, and books
and phrases could be read by different men in very
different ways. To one, they would suggest ordinary,
Qur anic doctrines ; another would see under and be
hind them a trail of metaphysical consequences
bristling with blasphemous possibilities. Thus,
Muslim science has been always of the school ; it has
never learned the vitalizing and disinfecting value
of the fresh air of the market-place. This applies
to philosophers even more than to theologians.
The crowning accusation which Ibn Bushd, the great
SPREAD OF ASITAKISM 207
Aristotelian commentator, brought against al-Ghaz-
zali was that he discussed such subtilties in popular-
books.
This, then, was the system which seems to have
reached tolerably complete form at the hands of al-
Baqilani, who died in 403. But with the comple
tion of the system there went by no means its uni
versal or even wide-spread acceptance in the Mus
lim world. That of al-Mataridi held its own for long,
and, even yet, the Mataridite creed of an-Nasafi is
used largely in the Turkish schools. In the fifth
century it was considered remarkable that Abu Dharr
(d. 434), a theologian of Herat, should be an Ash-
arite rather than, apparently, a Mataridite. It was
not till al-Ghazzali (d. 505) that the Ash arite sys
tem came to the orthodox hegemony in the East, and
it was only as the result of the work of Ibn Tumart,
the Mahdi of the Muwahhids (d. 524), that it con
quered the West. For long its path was darkened by
suspicion and persecution. This came almost en
tirely from the Hanbalites. The Mu tazilites had no
force behind them, and while the views of deists and
materialists were steadily making way in secret, their
public efforts appeared only in very occasional dis
putes between theologians and philosophers. As we
have seen, Muslim philosophy has always practised
an economy of teaching.
The Hanbalite crisis seems to have come to a head
toward the close of the reign of Tughril Beg, the first
Great Saljuq. In 429, as we have seen, the Saljuqs
had taken Merv and Samarqand, and in 447 Tughril
Beg had entered Baghdad and freed the Khalifa from
208 THEOLOGY
the Shi ite domination of the Buwayhids who had so
long enforced toleration. It was natural that he, a
theologically unschooled Turk, should be captured
by the simplicity and concreteness of the Hanbalite
doctrines.
Added to this political factor there was a theologi
cal movement at work which was deeply hostile to
the Ash arites as they had developed. An important
point in the method of al-Ash ari himself, and, after
him, of his followers, was to put forth a creed, ex
pressed in the old-fashioned terms and containing the
old-fashioned doctrines as nearly as was at all possible,
and to accompany it with a spiritualizing interpreta
tion which was, naturally, accessible to the professional
student only. Accordingly what had at first seemed a
weapon against the Mu tazilites came to be viewed with
more and more suspicion by the holders to the old,
unquestioning orthodoxy. The duty also of religious
investigation and speculation (nazr) came to have
more and more stress laid upon it. The bila kayfa
dropped into the background. A Muslim must have a
reason for the faith that was in him, they said ; other
wise, he was no true Muslim, was in fact an unbeliever.
Of course, they limited carefully the extent to which
he should go. For the ordinary man a series of very
simple proofs would be prepared ; the student, on
the other hand, when carefully led, could work his
way through the system sketched above. All this,
naturally, was anathema to the party of tradition.
It is significant that at this time the Zahirite school
of law (fqli) developed into a school of kalam and
applied its literal principles unflinchingly to its new
IBN HAZM 209
victim. The leader in this was Ibn Hazm, a theo
logian of Spain. He died in 456, after a stormy
life filled with controversy. The remorseless sting of
his vituperative style coupled him, in popular prov
erb, with al-Hajjaj, the blood-thirsty lieutenant of
the Umayyads in al-Iraq. " The sword of al-Hajjaj
and the tongue of Ibn Hazm," they said. But for
all his violence of language and real weight of char
acter and brain, he made little way for his views in
his lifetime. It was almost one hundred years after
his death before they came into any prominence.
The theologians and lawyers around him in the West
were devoted to the study of Jiqli in the narrowest
and most technical sense. They labored over the
systems and treatises of their predecessors and
neglected the great original sources of the Qur an
and the traditions. The immediate study of tradi
tion (hadith) had died out. Ibn Hazm, on the other
hand, went straight back to hadith. Taqlid he abso
lutely rejected, each man must draw from the sacred
texts his own views. So the whole system of the
canon lawyers came down with a crash and they, nat
urally, did not like it. Analogy (qiyas), their princi
pal instrument, he swept away. It had no place
either in law or theology. Even on the principle of
agreement (ijma) he threw a shadow of doubt.
But it was in theology rather than in law that Ibn
Hazm s originality lay. Strictly, his Zahirite prin
ciples when applied there should have led him to
anthropomorphism (tajsim). The literal meaning of
the Qur an, as we have seen, assigns to God hands and
feet, sitting on and descending from His throne. But
210 THEOLOGY
to Ibn Hazm, anthropomorphism was an abomination
only less than the speculative arguments with which
the Ash arites tried to avoid it. His own method was
purely grammatical and lexicographical. He hunted
in his dictionary until he found some other meaning
for "hand" or "foot," or whatever the stumbling-
block might be.
But the most original point in his system is his
doctrine of the names of God, and his basing of
that doctrine upon God s qualities. The Ash arites,
he contended with justice, had been guilty of a grave
inconsistency in saying that God was different in
nature, qualities, and actions from all created things,
and yet that the human qualities could be predicated
of God, and that men could reason about God s
nature. He accepted the doctrine of God s dif
ference (mukhalafa) on highly logical, but, for us,
rather startling grounds. The Qur an applies to
Him the words, " The Most Merciful of those that
show mercy," but God, evidently, is not merciful.
He tortures children with all manner of painful dis
eases, with hunger and terror. Mercy, in our human
sense, which is high praise applied to a man, cannot
be predicated of God. What then does the Qur an
mean by those words ? Simply that they arhamu-r-
rahimin are one of God s names, applied to Him by
Himself and that we have no right to take them as
descriptive of a quality, mercy, and to use them to
throw light on God s nature. They form one of
the Ninety-nine Most Beautiful Names (al-asma al-
liusna) of which the Prophet has spoken in a tradi
tion. Similarly, we may call God the Living One
IBN HAZM 211
(al hayy\ because He has given us that as one of
His names, not because of any reasoning on our part.
Do we not say that His life is different from that of
all other living beings ? These names then, are limited
to ninety-nine and no more should be formed, however
full of praise such might be for God, or however di
rectly based on His actions. He has called Himself
al-Wahib, the Giver, and so we may use that term
of Him. But He has not called Himself al-WahJiab
the Bountiful Giver, so we may not use that term of
Him, though it is one of praise. Of course, you may
describe His action and say that He is the guider
of His saints. But you must not make from that a
name, and call Him simply the Guider. Further, if
we regard these names as expressing qualities in
God, we involve multiplicity in God s nature ; there
is the quality and the thing qualified. Here we are
back at the old Mu tazilite difficulty and it is intelli
gible that Ibn Hazm dealt more gently with the Mu -
tazilites than with the Ash arites. The one party were
Muslims and sinned in ignorance invincible igno
rance, a Koman Catholic would call it; the others
were unbelievers. They had turned wilfully from
the way. The Mu tazilites had tried to limit the
qualities as much as possible. At the best they had
said that they were God s essence and not in His es
sence. Al-Ash ari and his school had fairly revelled
in qualities and had mapped out the nature of God
with the detail and daring of a phrenological chart.
Naturally, Ibn Hazm made his ethical basis the
will of God only. God has willed that this should
be a sin and that a good deed. Lying, he concedes,
THEOLOGY
is always saying what does not agree with the truth.
But, still, God may pronounce that one lie is a sin,
and one not. Muslim ethics, it is true, have never
branded lying as sinful in itself.
For the Shi ites and their doctrine of an infallible
Imam, Ibn Hazm cannot find strong enough expres
sions of contempt.
In Ibn Hazm s time, and he praises God for it,
there were but few Ash arites in the "West. Theology
generally did not find many students. So things
went on till long after his death. To this fiery con
troversialist the worst blow of all would have been if
he could have known that the men who were at last
to bring his system, in part and for a time, into
public acceptance and repute, were also to complete
the conquest of Islam for the Ash arite school. That
was still far in the future, and we must return to the
persecution.
* The accounts of the persecution which set in are
singularly conflicting. Some assign it to Hanbalite
influence ; others tell of a Mu tazilite wazir of Tughril
Beg. That the traditionalist party was the main
force in it seems certain. In all probability, how
ever, all the other anti-Ash arite sects, from the
Mu tazilites on, took their own parts. The Ash arite
party represented a via media and would be set upon
with zest by all the extremes. They were solemnly
cursed from the pvilpits and, what added peculiar
insult to it, the Ealidites, an extreme Kharijite sect,
were joined in the same anathema. Al-Juwayni, the
greatest theologian of the time, fled to the Hijaz
and gained the title of Imam of the two Harams
TRIUMPH OF ASH ARISM 213
(Imam al-Haramayri), by living for four years be
tween Mecca and al-Madina. Al-Qushayri, the author
of a celebrated treatise on Sufiism, was thrown into
prison. The Ash arite doctors generally were scat
tered to the winds. Only with the death of Tughril
Beg in 455 did the cloud pass. His successor, Alp-
Arslan, and especially the great wazir, Nizam al-Mulk,
favored the Ash arites. In 459 the latter founded
the Nizamite Academy at Baghdad to be a defence of
Ash ante doctrines. This may fairly be regarded as
the turning-point of the whole controversy. The
Hanbalite mob of Baghdad still continued to make
itself felt, but its excesses were promptly suppressed.
In 510 ash-Shahrastani was well received there by
the people, and in 516 the Khalifa himself attended
Ash arite lectures.
It is needless to spend more time over the other
theologians who were links in the chain between al-
Ash ari and the Imam al-Haramayn. Their views
wavered, this way and that, only the rationalizing
tendency became stronger and stronger. There was
danger that the orthodox system would fossilize and
lose touch with life as that of the Mu tazilites had
done. It is true that Sufiism still held its ground.
All theologians practically were touched by it in its
simpler form ; and the cause of the higher Sufiism
of ecstasy, wonders by saints (karamat) and commun
ion of the individual soul with God had been elo
quently and effectively urged by al-Qushayri (d. 465)
in his Eisala. But in spite of the labors of so many
men of high ability, the religious outlook was grow
ing ever darker. Keen observers recognized that
214 THEOLOGY
some change was bound to come. That it might be
an inflowing of new life by a new al-Ash ari was their
prayer. It is more than dubious whether even the
keenest mind of the time could have recognized what
form the new life must take. They had not the
perspective and could only feel a vague need. But
from what has gone before it will be plain that Islam
had again to assimilate to itself something from with
out or perish. Such had been its manner of progress
up till now. New opinions had arisen ; had become
heresies; conflict had followed; part of the new
thought had been absorbed into the orthodox church ;
part had been rejected ; through it all the life of the
church had gone on in fuller and richer measure,
being always, in spite of everything, the main stream ;
the heresy itself had slowly dwindled out of sight.
So it had been with Murji ism ; so with Mu tazilism.
With the orthodox, tradition (naql) still stood fast,
but reason (aql) had taken a place beside ib. Kalam,
in spite of Hanbalite clamors, had become fairly a
part of their system. What was to be the new ele
ment, and w r ho was to be its champion ?
CHAPTEE IV
Al-Ghazzali, his life, times, and work ; Sufiism formally accepted
into Islam.
WITH the time came the man. He was al-Ghazzali,
the greatest, certainly the most sympathetic figure in
the history of Islam, and the only teacher of the after
generations ever put by a Muslim on a level with the
four great Imams. The equal of Augustine in philo
sophical and theological importance, by his side the
Aristotelian philosophers of Islam, Ibn Rushd and
all the rest, seem beggarly compilers and scholiasts.
Only al-Farabi, and that in virtue of his mysticism,
approaches him. In his own person he took up the
life of his time on all its sides and with it all its prob
lems. He lived through them all and drew his the
ology from his experience. Systems and classifica
tions, words and arguments about words, he swept
away ; the facts of life as he had known them in his
own soul he grasped. When his work was done the
revelation of the mystic (kashf) was not only a full
part but the basal part in the structure of Muslim
theology. That basis, in spite, or rather on account
of the work of the mutakallims had previously been
lacking. Such a scepticism as their atomic system
had practically amounted to, could disprove much but
could prove little. If all the catagories but substance
and quality are mere subjectivities, existing in the
215
216 THEOLOGY
mind only, what can we know of things ? An ultra-
rational basis had to be found and it was found in
the ecstasy of the Sufis. But al-Ghazzali brought
another element into fuller and more effective work
ing. With him passes away the old-fashioned kalam,
a thing of shreds and patches, scraps of metaphysics
and logic snatched up for a moment of need, without
grasp of the full sweep of philosophy, and incapable,
in the long run, of meeting it. Even its atomic sys
tem is a philosophy of amateurs, with all their fan
tastic one-sidedness, their vigor and rigor. But al-
Ghazzali was no amateur. His knowledge and grasp
of the problems and objects of philosophy were truer
and more vital than in any other Muslim up to his
time perhaps after it, too. Islam has not fully un
derstood him any more than Christendom fully under
stood Augustine, but until long after him the horizon
of Muslims was wider and their air clearer for his
work. Then came a new scholasticism, reigning to
this day.
So much by way of preface. We must now give
some account of the life and experiences, the ideas
and sensations, of this great leader and reformer.
For his life and his work were one. Everything that
he thought and wrote came with the weight and real
ity of personal experience. He recognized this con
nection himself, and has left us a book the Mun-
qidh min ad-dalal, "Bescuer from Error" almost
unique in Islam, which, in the form of an apology for
the faith, is really an Apologia pro vita sua. This
book is our main source for what follows.
Al-Ghazzali was born at Tus in 450. He lost his
EARLY CAREER ; RENUNCIATION 217
father when young and was educated and brought up
by a trusted Sufi friend. He early turned to the
study of theology and canon law, but, as he himself
confesses, it was only because they promised wealth
and reputation. Yery early he broke away from
taqlid, simple acceptance of religious truth on author
ity, and he began to investigate theological differ
ences before he was twenty. His studies were of
the broadest, embracing canon law, theology, dialectic,
science, philosophy, logic and the doctrines and prac
tices of the Sufis. It was a Sufi atmosphere in which
he moved, but their religious fervors do not seem to
have laid hold of him. Pride in his own intellectual
powers, ambition and contempt for others of less abil
ity mastered him. The latter part of his life as a
student was spent at Naysabur as pupil and assistant
of the Imam al-Hararnayn. Through the Imam he
stood in the apostolic succession of Ash arite teach
ers, being the fourth from al-Ash ari himself. There
he remained till the death of the Imam in 478, when
he went out to seek his fortune and found it with the
great wazir, Nizam al-Mulk. By him al-Ghazzali was
appointed, in 484, to teach in the Nizamite Academy
at Baghdad. There he had the greatest success as a
teacher and consulting lawyer, and his worldly hopes
seemed safe. But suddenly he was struck down by a
mysterious disease. His speech became hampered ;
his appetite and digestion failed. His physicians
gave him up ; his malady, they said, was mental and
could only be mentally treated. His only hope lay in
peace of mind. Then he suddenly quitted Baghdad,
in 488, ostensibly on pilgrimage to Mecca. This
218 THEOLOGY
flight, for it was so in effect, of al-Ghazzali was unin
telligible to the theologians of the time ; since that
time it has marked the greatest epoch in the church
of Islam after the return of al-Ash ari.
That it should be unintelligible was natural. No
cause could be seen on the surface, except some pos
sible political complications ; the cause in reality lay
in al-Ghazzali s mind and conscience. He was wan
dering in the labyrinth of his time. From his youth
he had been a sceptical, ambitious student, playing
with religious influences yet unaffected by them.
But the hollowness of his life was ever present with
him and pressing upon him. Like some with us, he
sought to be converted and could not bring it to pass.
His religious beliefs gradually gave way and fell from
him, piece by piece.
At last, the strain became too great and at the
court of Nizam al-Mulk he touched for two months
the depths of absolute scepticism. He doubted the
evidence of the senses ; he could see plainly that they
often deceived. No eye could perceive the move
ment of a shadow, but still the shadow moved ; a gold
piece would cover any star, but a star was a world
larger than the earth. He doubted even the primary
ideas of the mind. Is ten more than three ? Can a
thing be and not be ? Perhaps ; he could not tell.
His senses deceived him, why not his mind? May
there not be something behind the mind and tran
scending it, which would show the falsity of its con
victions even as the mind showed the falsity of the in
formation given by the senses ? May not the dreams
of the Sufis be true, and their revelations in ecstasy
THE SEEKERS OF HIS TIME 219
the only real guides ? When we awake in death, may
it not be into a true but different existence ? All this
perhaps. And so he wandered for two months.
He saw clearly that no reasoning could help him
here ; he had no ideas on which he could depend,
from which he could begin. But the mercy of God
is great; He sends His light to whom He wills,
a light that flows in, and is given by no reasoning.
By it al-Ghazzali was saved ; he regained the power
to think, and the task which he now set before him
was to use this power to guide himself to truth.
When he looked around, he saw that those who gave
themselves to the search for truth might be divided
into four groups. There were the scholastic theolo
gians, who were much like the theologians of all times
and faiths. Second, there were the Ta limites, who
held that to reach truth one must have an infallible
living teacher, and that there was such a teacher.
Third, there were the followers of philosophy, bas
ing on logical and rational proofs. Fourth, there
were the Sufis, who held that they, the chosen of
God, could reach knowledge of Him directly in
ecstasy. With all these he had, of course, been
acquainted to a greater or less degree ; but now he
settled down to examine them one by one, and find
which would lead him to a certainty to which he
could hold, whatever might come. He felt that he
could not go back to the unconscious faith of his
childhood ; that nothing could restore. All his mental
being must be made over before he could find rest.
He began with scholastic theology, but found no
help there. Grant the theologians their premises
220 THEOLOGY
and they could argue ; deny them and there was no
common ground on which to meet. Their science
had been founded by al-Ash ari to meet the Mu ta-
zilites ; it had done that victoriously, but could do
no more. They could hold the faith against here
tics, expose their inconsistencies ; against the sceptic
they availed nothing. It is true that they had at
tempted to go further back and meet the students
of philosophy on their own ground; to deal with
substances and attributes and first principles gen
erally ; but their efforts had been fruitless. They
lacked the necessary knowledge of the subject, had
no scientific basis, and were constrained eventually
to fall back on authority. After study of them and
their methods it became clear to al-Ghazzali that
the remedy for his ailment was not in scholastic
theology.
Then he turned to philosophy. He had seen al
ready that the weakness of the theologians lay in
their not having made a sufficient study of primary
ideas and the laws of thought. Three years he gave
up to this. He was at Baghdad at the time, teach
ing law and writing legal treatises, and probably
the three years extended from the beginning of 484
to the beginning of 487. Two years he gave, without
a teacher, to the study of the writings of the different
schools of philosophy, and almost another to medi
tating and working over his results. He felt that
he was the first Muslim doctor to do this with the
requisite thoroughness. And it is noteworthy that at
this stage he seems to have again felt himself to be a
Muslim, and in an enemy s country when he was
MATERIALISTS ; DEISTS ; THEISTS 221
studying philosophy. He speaks of the necessity of
understanding what is to be refuted ; but this may
be only a confusion between his attitude when writing
after 500, and his attitude when investigating and
seeking truth, fifteen years earlier. He divides the
followers of philosophy in his time into three : Mate
rialists, Deists (Tabi is, i.e. Naturalists), and Theists.
The materialists reject a creator ; the world exists
from all eternity ; the animal comes from the egg
and the egg from the animal. The wonder of cre
ation compels the deists to admit a creator, but the
creature is a machine, has a certain poise (i tidal) in
itself which keeps it running ; its thought is a part
of its nature and ends with death. They thus re
ject a future life, though admitting God and His
attributes.
He deals at much greater length with the teach
ings of those whom he calls theists, but through
all his statements of their views his tone is not
that of a seeker but that of a partisan; he turns
his own experiences into a warning to others, and
makes of their record a little guide to apologetics.
Aristotle he regards as the final master of the Greek
school ; his doctrines are best represented for Arabic
readers in the books of Ibn Sina and al-Farabi ; the
works of their predecessors on this subject are a mass
of confusion. Part of these doctrines must be
stamped as unbelief, part as heresy, and part as
theologically indifferent. He then divides the philo
sophical sciences into six, mathematics, logic, phys
ics, metaphysics, political economy, ethics ; and dis
cusses these in detail, showing what must be rejected,
222 THEOLOGY
what is indifferent, what dangers arise from each to
him who studies or to him who rejects without study.
Throughout, he is very cautious to mark nothing as
unbelief that is not really so ; to admit always those
truths of mathematics, logic, and physics that cannot
intellectually be rejected ; and only to warn against
an attitude of intellectualism and a belief that math
ematicians, with their success in their own depart
ment, are to be followed in other departments, or
that all subjects are susceptible of the exactness and
certainty of a syllogism in logic. The damnable
errors of the theists are almost entirely in their
metaphysical views. Three of their propositions
mark them as unbelievers. First, they reject the
resurrection of the body and physical punishment
hereafter ; the punishments of the next world will
be spiritual only. That there will be spiritual pun
ishments, al-Ghazzali admits, but there will be phys
ical as well. Second, they hold that God knows
universals only, not particulars. Third, they hold
that the world exists from all eternity and to all
eternity. When they reject the attributes of God
and hold that He knows by His essence and not
by something added to His essence, they are only
heretics and not unbelievers. In physics he accepts
the constitution of the world as developed and ex
plained by them ; only all is to be regarded as en
tirely submitted to God, incapable of self-move
ment, a tool of which the Creator makes use.
Finally, he considers that their system of ethics is
derived from the Sufis. At all times there have
been such saints, retired from the world God has
FAILURE OF PHILOSOPHY 223
never left himself without a witness ; and from their
ecstasies and revelations our knowledge of the hu
man heart, for good and for evil, is derived.
Thus in philosophy he found little light. It did
not correspond entirely to his needs, for reason can
not answer all questions nor unveil all the enigmas
of life. He would probably have admitted that he
had learned much in his philosophical studies so at
least we may gather from his tone ; he never speaks
disrespectfully of philosophy and science in their
sphere ; his continual exhortation is that he who
would understand them and refute them must first
study them ; that to do otherwise, to abuse what we
do not know, brings only contempt on ourselves and
on the cause which we champion. But with his
temperament he could not found his religion on intel
lect. As a lawyer he could split hairs and define
issues ; but once the religious instinct was aroused,
nothing could satisfy him but what he eventually
found. And so, two possibilities and two only were
before him, though one was hardly a real possibility,
if we consider his training and mental powers. He
might fall back on authority. It could not be the
authority of his childish faith, " Our fathers have told
us," he himself confesses, could never again have
weight with him. But it might be some claimer of
authority in a new form, some infallible teacher with
a doctrine which he could accept for the authority
behind it. As the Church of Home from time to
time gathers into its fold men of keen intellect who
seek rest in submission, and the world marvels, so it
might have been with him. Or again, he might turn
224 THEOLOGY
directly to God and to personal intercourse with
Him ; he might seek to know Him and to be taught
of Him without any intermediary, in a word to enter
on the path of the mystic.
He came next to examine the doctrine of the Ta -
limites. They, a somewhat outlying wing of the
Fatimid propaganda, had come at this time into
alarming prominence. In 483 Hasan ibn as-Sabbah
had seized Alamut and entered on open rebellion.
The sect of the Assassins was applying its principles.
But the poison of their teaching was also spreading
among the people. The principle of authority in re
ligion, that only by an infallible teacher could truth
be reached and that such an infallible teacher existed
if he could only be found, was in the air. For him
self, al-Ghazzali found the Ta limites and their teach
ing eminently unsatisfactory : They had a lesson
which they went over parrot-fashion, but beyond it
they were in dense ignorance. The trained theolo
gian and scholar had no patience with their slack
ness and shallowness of thought. He labored long,
as ash-Shahrastani later confesses that he, too, did, to
penetrate their mystery and learn something from
them ; but beyond the accustomed formulae there
was nothing to be found. He even admitted their
contention of the necessity of a living, infallible
teacher, to see what would follow but nothing fol
lowed. " You admit the necessity of an Imam," they
would say. " It is your business now to seek him ;
we have nothing to do with it." But though neither
al-Ghazzali nor ash-Shahrastani, who died 43 (lunar)
years after him, could be satisfied with the Ta lim-
STUDY OF SUFIISM 225
ites, many others were. The conflict was hot, and al-
Ghazzali himself wrote several books against them.
The other possibility, the path of the mystic,
now lay straight before him. In the Munqidli he
tells us how, when he had made an end of the Ta -
limites, he began to study the books of the Sufis,
without any suggestion that he had had a previous
acquaintance with them and their practices. But
probably this means nothing more than it does when
he speaks in a similar way of studying the scholastic
theologians ; namely, that he now took up the study
in earnest and with a new and definite purpose. He
therefore read carefully the works of al-Harith al-
Muhasibi, the fragments of al-Junayd, ash-Shibli,
and Abu Yazid al-Bistami. He had also the benefit
of oral teaching ; but it became plain to him that
only through ecstasy and the complete transforma
tion of the moral being could he really understand
Sufiism. He saw that it consisted in feelings more
than in knowledge, that he must be initiated as a
Sufi himself ; live their life and practise their exer
cises, to attain his goal.
On the way upon which he had gone up to this
time, he had gained three fixed points of faith.
He now believed firmly in God, in prophecy, and
in the last judgment. He had also gained the be
lief that only by detaching himself from this world,
its life, enjoyments, honors, and turning to God
could he be saved in the world to come. He looked
on his present life, his writing and his teaching,
and saw of how little value it was in the face of the
great fact of heaven and hell. All he did now was for
226 THEOLOGY
the sake of vainglory and had in it no consecration to
the service of God. He felt on the ed^e of an abyss.
The world held him back ; his fears urged him away.
He was in the throes of a conversion wrought by ter
ror ; his religion, now and always, in common with
all Islam, was other-worldly. So he remained in
conflict with himself for six months from the middle
of 488. Finally, his health broke down under the
strain. In his feebleness and overthrow he took refuge
with God, as a man at the end of his resources. God
heard him and enabled him to make the needed sac
rifices. He abandoned all and wandered forth from
Baghdad as a Sufi. He had put his brilliant pres
ent and brilliant future absolutely behind him ; had
given up everything for the peace of his soul. This
date, the end of 488, was the great era in his life ;
but it marked an era, too, in the history of Islam.
Since al-Ash ari went back to the faith of his fathers
in 300, and cursed the Mu tazilites and all their
works, there had been no such epoch as this flight of
al-Ghazzali. It meant that the reign of mere scho
lasticism was over ; that another element was to
work openly in the future Church of Islam, the ele
ment of the mystical life in God, of the attainment of
truth by the soul in direct vision.
He went to Syria and gave himself up for two yearr
to the religious exercises of the Sufis. Then he went
on pilgrimage, first to Jerusalem ; then to the tomb of
Abraham at Hebron ; finally to Mecca and al-Madina.
With this religious duty his life of strict retirement
ended. It is evident that he now felt that he was again
within the fold of Islam. In spite of his former reso-
ON THE PATH OF THE SUFIS 227
lution to retire from the world, he was drawn back.
The prayers of his children and his own aspirations
broke in upon him, and though he resolved again
and again to return to the contemplative life, and
did often actually do so, yet events, family affairs,
and the anxieties of life, kept continually disturbing
him.
This went on, he tells us, for almost ten years, and
in that time there were revealed to him things that
could not be reckoned and the discussion of which
could not be exhausted. He learned that the Sufis
were on the true and only path to the knowledge
of God ; that neither intelligence nor wisdom nor
science could change or improve their doctrine or
their ethics. The light in which they walk is es
sentially the same as the light of prophecy ; Muham
mad was a Sufi when on his way to be a prophet.
There is none other light to light any man in this
world. A complete purifying of the heart from all
but God is their Path ; a seeking to plunge the
heart completely in the thought of God, is its be
ginning, and its end is complete passing away in
God. This last is only its end in relation to what
can be entered upon and grasped by a voluntary ef
fort ; in truth, it is only the first step in the Path,
the vestibule to the contemplative life. Revelations
(mukashafas, unveilings) came to the disciples from
the very beginning ; while awake they see angels
and souls of prophets, hear their voices and gain
from them guidance. Then their State (hot, a Sufi
technicality for a state of ecstasy) passes from the
beholding of forms to stages where language fails and
228 THEOLOGY
any attempt to express what is experienced must
involve some error. They reach a nearness to God
which some have fancied to be a hulul, fusion of being,
others an ittihad, identification, and others a ivusul,
union; but these are all erroneous ways of indicat
ing the thing. Al-Ghazzali notes one of his books in
which he has explained wherein the error lies. But
the thing itself is the true basis of all faith and the
beginning of prophecy ; the karamat of the saints
lead to the miracles of the prophets. By this means
the possibility and the existence of prophecy can be
proved, and then the life itself of Muhammad proves
that he was a prophet. Al-Ghazzali goes on to deal
with the nature of prophecy, and how the life of Mu
hammad shows the truth of his mission ; but enough
has been given to indicate his attitude and the stage
at which he had himself arrived.
During this ten years he had returned to his native
country and to his children, but had not undertaken
public duty as a teacher. Now that was forced upon
him. The century was drawing to a close. Every
where there was evident a slackening of religious
fervor and faith. A mere external compliance with the
rules of Islam was observed, men even openly defended
such a course. He adduces as an example of this
the Wasiya of Ibn Sina. The students of philosophy
went their way, and their conduct shook the minds of
the people ; false Sufis abounded, who taught anti-
nomianism ; the lives of many theologians excited
scandal ; the Ta limites were still spreading. A re
ligious leader to turn the current was absolutely
needed, and his friends looked to al-Ghazzali to take
THE TAHAFUT 229
up that duty ; some distinguished saints had dreams
of his success ; God had promised a reformer every
hundred years and the time was up. Finally, the
Sultan laid a command upon him to go and teach in
the academy at Naysabur, and he was forced to con
sent. His departure for Naysabur fell at the end of
499, exactly eleven years after his flight from Bagh
dad. But he did not teach there long. Before the
end of his life we find him back at Tus, his native place,
living in retirement among his disciples, in a Ma-
drasa or academy for students and a Khanqah or
monastery for Sufis.
There he settled down to study and contemplation.
We have already seen what theological position he had
reached. Philosophy had been tried and found want
ing. In a book of his called Tahafut, or "Destruction,"
he had smitten the philosophers hip and thigh ; he
had turned, as in earlier times al-Ash ari, their own
weapons against them, and had shown that with
their premises and methods no certainty could be
reached. In that book he goes to the extreme of in
tellectual scepticism, and, seven hundred years be
fore Hume, he cuts the bond of causality with the
edge of his dialectic and proclaims that we can know
nothing of cause or effect, but simply that one thing
follows another. He combats their proof of the
eternity of the world, and exposes their assertion that
God is its creator. He demonstrates that they can
not prove the existence of the creator or that that
creator is one; that they cannot prove that He is
incorporeal, or that the world has any creator or
cause at all; that they cannot prove the nature of
230 THEOLOGY
God or that the human soul is a spiritual essence.
When he has finished there is no intellectual basis
left for life ; he stands beside the Greek sceptics and
beside Hume. We are thrown back on revelation,
that given immediately by God to the individual
soul or that given through prophets. All our real
knowledge is derived from these sources. So it was
natural that in the latter part of his life he should
turn to the traditions of the Prophet. The science oi
tradition must certainly have formed part of his early
studies, as of those of all Muslim theologians, but he
had not specialized in it ; his bent had lain in quite
other directions. His master, the Imam al-Hara-
mayn, had been no student of tradition ; among his
many works is not one dealing with that subject.
Now he saw that the truth and the knowledge of the
truth lay there, and he gave himself, with all the
energy of his nature, to the new pursuit.
The end of his wanderings came at Tus, in 505.
There he died while seeking truth in the traditions oi
Muhammad, as al-Ash ari, his predecessor, had done.
The stamp of his personality is inefFaceably impressed
on Islam. The people of his time reverenced him
as a saint and wonder-worker. He himself never
claimed to work karamat and always spoke modestly
of the light which he had reached in ecstasy. After
his death legends early began to gather round him,
and the current biographies of him are untrustworthy
to a degree. It says much for the solidity of his
work that he did not pass into a misty figure of pop
ular superstition. But that work remained and re
mains among his disciples and in his books. We
VOLITION AS A BASIS 231
must now attempt to estimate its bearing and
scope.
For him, as for the mutakallims in general, the
fundamental thing in the world and the starting-point
of all speculation is will. The philosophers in their
intellectualism might picture God as thought-
thought thinking itself and evolving all things
thereby. Their source was Plotinus ; that of the
Muslims was the terrific " Be ! " of creation. But
how can we know this will of God if we are simply
part of what it has produced ? In answering this,
al-Ghazzali and his followers have diverged from the
rest of Islam, but not into heresy. Their view is
admitted to be a possible interpretation of Qur anic
passages, if not that commonly held. The soul of
man, al-Ghazzali taught, is essentially different from
the rest of the created things. We read in the Qur an
(xv, 29 ; xxxviii, 72) that God breathed into man of
His spirit (ruh). This is compared with the rays of
the sun reaching a thing on the earth and warming it.
In virtue of this, the soul of man is different from
everything else in the world. It is a spiritual sub
stance (jawhar ruhani), has no corporeality, and is
not subject to dimension, position or locality. It is
not in the body or outside of the body; to apply
such categories to it is as absurd as to speak of the
knowledge or ignorance of a stone. Though created,
it is not shaped ; it belongs to the spiritual world
and not to this world of sensible things. It contains
some spark of the divine and it is restless till it rests
again in that primal fire ; but, again, it is recorded in
tradition that the Prophet said, " God Most High
232 THEOLOGY
created Adam in His own form (sura). 1 Al-Ghazzali
takes that to mean that there is a likeness between
the spirit of man and God in essence, quality, and
actions. Further, the spirit of man rules the body
as God rules the world. Man s body is a microcosm
beside the macrocosm of this world, and they cor
respond, part by part. Ts, then, God simply the
anima mundi ? No, because He is the creator of all
by His will, the sustainer and destroyer by His will.
Al-Ghazzali comes to this by a study of himself. His
primary conception is, volo ergo sum. It is not
thought which impresses him, but volition. From
thought he can develop nothing ; from will can come
the whole round universe. But if God, the Creator,
is a Wilier, so, too, is the soul of man. They are kin,
and, therefore, man can know and recognize God.
" He who knows his own soul, knows his Lord," said
another tradition.
This view of the nature of the soul is essential to
the Sufi position and is probably borrowed from it.
But there are in it two possibilities of heresy, if the
view be pushed any further. It tends (1) to destroy
the important Muslim dogma of God s Difference
(mukhalafa) from all created things, and (2) to main
tain that the souls of men are partakers of the divine
nature and will return to it at death. Al-Ghazzali
labored to safeguard both dangers, but they were
there and showed themselves in time. Just as the
Aristotelian 4- neo-Platonic philosophers reached the
position that the universe with all its spheres was
God, so, later, Sufis came to the other pantheistic
position that God was the world. Before the atomic
DIVINE ORIGIN OF SCIENCES 233
scholastics the same danger also lay. It is part of
the irony of the history of Muslim theology that the
very emphasis on the transcendental unity should
lead thus to pantheism. Al-Ghazzali s endeavor was
to strike the via media. The Hegelian Trinity might
have appealed to him.
To return, his views on science, as we have already
seen, were the same as those of the contemporary
students of natural philosophy. Their teachings he
accepted, and, so far, he can be compared to a theo
logian of the present day, who accepts evolution and
explains it to suit himself. His world was framed on
what is commonly called the Ptolemaic system. He
was no flat-earth man like the present Ulama of
Islam ; God had " spread out the earth like a carpet,"
but that did not hinder him from regarding it as a
globe. Around it revolve the spheres of the seven
planets and that of the fixed stars; Alphonso the
Wise had not yet added the crystalline sphere and
the primum mobile. All that astronomers and mathe
maticians teach us of the laws under which these
bodies move is to be accepted. Their theory of
eclipses and of other phenomena of the heavens is
true, whatever the ignorant and superstitious may
clamor. Yet it is to be remembered that the most
important facts and laws have been divinely revealed.
As the weightiest truths of medicine are to be traced
back to the teaching of the prophets, so there are con
junctions in the heavens which occur only once in a
thousand years and which man can yet calculate be
cause God has taught him their laws. And all this
structure of the heavens and the earth is the direct
234 THEOLOGY
work of God, produced out of nothing by His will,
guided by His will, ever dependent for existence on
His will, and one day to pass away at His command.
So al-Ghazzali joins science and revelation. Behind
the order of nature lies the personal, omnipotent God
who says, "Be! " and it is. The things of existence
do not proceed from Him by any emanation or evolu
tion, but are produced directly by Him.
Further, there is another side of al-Ghazzali s atti
tude toward the physical universe that deserves atten
tion, but which is very difficult to grasp or express.
Perhaps it may be stated thus : Existence has three
modes ; there is existence in the alam al-mulk, in the
alam al-jabarut, and in the alam al-malakut. The first
is this world of ours which is apparent to the senses ;
it exists by the power (qudrd) of God, one part pro
ceeding from another in constant change. The alam
al-malakut exists by God s eternal decree, without
development, remaining in one state without addition
or diminution. The alam al-jabarut comes between
these two ; it seems externally to belong to the first,
but in respect of the power of God which is from all
eternity (al-qudra al-azaliya) it is included in the
second. The soul (nafs) belongs to the alam al-
malakut, is taken from it and returns to it. In sleep
and in ecstasy, even in this world, it can come into
contact with the world from which it is derived. This
is what happens in dreams " sleep is the brother of
death," says al-Ghazzali ; and thus, too, the saints
and the prophets attain divine knowledge. Some
angels belong to the world of malakut ; some to that
of jabarut, apparently those who have shown them-
THE THREE WORLDS 235
selves here as messengers of God. The things in the
heavens, the preserved tablet, the pen, the balance,
etc., belong to the world of malakut. On the one
hand, these are not sensible, corporeal things, and,
on the other, these terms for them are not metaphors.
Thus al-Ghazzali avoids the difficulty of Muslim
eschatology with its bizarre concreteness. He rejects
the right to allegorize these things are real, actual ;
but he relegates them to this world of malakut.
Again, the Qur an, Islam, and Friday (the day of pub
lic worship) are personalities in the world of malakut
sniidjabarut. So, too, the world of mulk must appear
as a personality at the bar of these other worlds at
the last day. It will come as an ugly old woman, but
Friday as a beautiful young bride. This personal
Qur an belongs to the world ofjabarut, but Islam to
that of malakut.
But just as those three worlds are not thought of
as separate in time, so they are not separate in space.
They are not like the seven heavens and seven earths
of Muslim literalists, which stand, story-fashion, one
above the other. Rather they are, as expressed above,
modes of existence, and might be compared to the
speculations on another life in space of n dimensions,
framed, from a very different starting-point and on a
basis of pure physics, by Balfour Stewart and Tait
in their " Unseen Universe." On another side they
stand in close kinship to the Platonic world of ideas,
whether through neo-Platonism or more immediately.
Sufiism at its best, and when stripped of the trap
pings of Muslim tradition and Qur anic exegesis, has
no reason to shrink from the investigation either of
236 THEOLOGY
the physicist or of the metaphysician. And so it is
not strange to find that all Muslim thinkers have been
tinged with mysticism to a greater or less degree,
though they may not all have embraced formal
Sufiisrn. and accepted its vocabulary and system.
This is true of al-Farabi, who was avowedly a Sufi ;
true also of Ibn Sina, who, though nominally an
Aristotelian, was essentially a neo-Platonist, and ad
mitted the possibility of intercourse with superior
beings and with the Active Intellect, of miracles and
revelations ; true even of Ibn Eushd, who does not
venture to deny the immediate knowledge of the Sufi
saints, but only argues that experience of it is not
sufficiently general to be made a basis for theological
science.
In ethics, as we have already seen, the position of
al-Ghazzali is a simple one. All our laws and theories
upon the subject, the analysis of the qualities of the
mind, good and bad, the tracing of hidden defects to
their causes all these things we owe to the saints of
God to whom God Himself has revealed them. Of
these there have been many at all times and in all
countries, and without them and their labors and the
light which God has vouchsafed to them, we could
never know ourselves. Here, as everywhere, comes
out al-Ghazzali s fundamental position that the ulti
mate source of all knowledge is revelation from God.
It may be major revelation, through accredited proph
ets who come forward as teachers, divinely sent
and supported by miracles and by the evident truth
of their message appealing to the human heart, or it
may be minor revelation subsidiary and explanatory
AGNOSTIC ATTITUDE 237
through the vast body of saints of different grades,
to whom God has granted immediate knowledge of
Himself. Where the saints leave off, the prophets
begin; and, apart from such teaching, man, even
in physical science, would be groping in the
dark.
This position becomes still more prominent in his
philosophical system. His agnostic attitude toward
the results of pure thought has been already sketched.
It is essentially the same as that taken up by Man sell
in his Bampton lectures on " The Limits of Religious
Thought." Manseli, a pupil and continuator of Ham
ilton, developed and emphasized Hamilton s doctrine
of the relativity of knowledge, and applied it to the
ology, maintaining that we cannot know or think of
the absolute and infinite, but only of the relative and
finite. Hence, he went on to argue, we can have no
positive knowledge of the attributes of God. This,
though disguised by the methods and language of
scholastic philosophy, is al-Ghazzali s attitude in the
Taliafut. Mansell s opponents said that he was like
a man sitting on the branch of a tree and sawing off
his seat. Al-Ghazzali, for the support of his seat,
went back to revelation, either major, in the books
sent down to the prophets, or minor, in the personal
revelations of God s saints. Further, it was not only
in the Muslim schools that this attitude toward phi
losophy prevailed. Yehuda Halevi (d. A.D. 1145 ; al-
Ghazzali, d. 1111) also maintains in his Kusari the
insufficiency of philosophy in the highest questions
of life, and bases religious truth on the incontrovert
ible historical facts of revelation. And Maimonides
238 THEOLOGY
(d. A.D. 1204) in his Moreh Nebuchim takes essentially
the same position.
Of his views on dogmatic theology little need be
said. Among modern theologians he stands nearest
to Kitschl. Like Eitschl, he rejects metaphysics and
opposes the influence of any philosophical system on
his theology. The basis must be religious phenom
ena, simply accepted and correlated. Like Kitschl,
too, he was emphatically ethical in his attitude ; he
lays stress on the value for its of a doctrine or a piece
of knowledge. Our source of religious knowledge is
revelation, and beyond a certain point we must not
inquire as to the how and why of that knowledge.
To do so would be to enter metaphysics and the
danger-zone where we lose touch with vital realities
and begin to use mere words. On one point he goes
beyond Kitschl, and, on another, Kitschl goes beyond
him. In his devotion to the facts of the religious
consciousness Kitschl did not go so far as to become
a mystic, indeed rejected mysticism with a conscious
indignation ; al-Ghazzali did become a mystic. But,
on the other hand, Kitschl refused absolutely to enter
upon the nature of God or upon the divine attributes
all that was mere metaphysics and heathenism ;
al-Ghazzali did not so far emancipate himself, and
his only advance was to keep the doctrine on a strictly
Qur anic basis. So it stands written ; not, so man is
compelled by the nature of things to think.
His work and influence in Islam may be summed
up briefly as follows : First, he led men back from
scholastic labors upon theological dogmas to living
contact with, study and exegesis of, the Word and the
WORK AND INFLUENCE 239
traditions. What happened in Europe when the
yoke of mediaeval scholasticism was broken, what is
happening with us now, happened in Islam under his
leadership. He could be a scholastic with scholastics,
but to state and develop theological doctrine on a
Scriptural basis was emphatically his method. We
should now call him a Biblical theologian.
Second, in his teaching and moral exhortations he
reintroduced the element of fear. In the Munqidh
and elsewhere he lays stress on the need of such a
striking of terror into the minds of the people. His
was no time, he held, for smooth, hopeful preaching ;
no time for optimism either as to this world or the
next. The horrors of hell must be kept before men ;
he had felt them himself. We have seen how other
worldly was his own attitude, and how the fear of
the Fire had been the supreme motive in his conver
sion ; and so he treated others.
Third, it was by his influence that Sufiism at
tained a firm and assured position in the Church of
Islam.
Fourth, he brought philosophy and philosophical
theology within the range of the ordinary mind.
Before his time they had been surrounded, more or
less, with mystery. The language used was strange ;
its vocabulary and terms of art had to be specially
learned. No mere reader of the Arabic of the street
or the mosque or the school could understand at
once a philosophical tractate. Greek ideas and ex
pressions, passing through a Syriac version into
Arabic, had strained to the uttermost the resources of
even that most flexible tongue. A long training had
240 THEOLOGY
been thought necessary before the elaborate and
formal method of argumentation could be followed.
All this al-Ghazzali changed, or at least tried to
change. His Taliafut is not addressed to scholars
only ; he seeks with it a wider circle of readers, and
contends that the views, the arguments, and the falla
cies of the philosophers should be perfectly intelli
gible to the general public.
Of these four phases of al-Ghazzali s work, the
first and the third are undoubtedly the most impor
tant. He made his mark by leading Islam back to
its fundamental and historical facts, and by giving a
place in its system to the emotional religious life.
But it will have been noticed that in none of the four
phases was he a pioneer. He was not a scholar who
struck out a new path, but a man of intense personal
ity who entered on a path already blazed and made
it the common highway. We have here his charac
ter. Other men may have been keener logicians,
more learned theologians, more gifted saints ; but he,
through his personal experiences, had attained so
overpowering a sense of the divine realities that the
force of his character once combative and restless,
now narrowed and intense swept all before it, and
the Church of Islam entered on a new era of its ex
istence.
So much space it has been necessary to give to
this great man. Islam has never outgrown him, has
never fully understood him. In the renaissance of
Islam which is now rising to view his time will come
and the new life will proceed from a renewed study
of his works.
LATER ASH ARITES 241
From this time on, the Ash arites may be fairly
regarded as the dominant school so far as the East
is concerned. Saladin (d. 589) did much to aid in
the establishment of this hegemony. He was a de
vout Muslim with the taste of an amateur for theolog
ical literature. Anecdotes tell how he had a special
little catechism composed, and used himself to in
struct his children in it. He founded theological
academies in Egypt at Alexandria and Cairo, the
first there except the Fatimid Hall of Science.
One of the few blots on his name is the execution
of the pantheistic Sufi, Shihab ad-Din as-Suhrawardi,
at Aleppo in 587. Meanwhile, in the farther East,
Fakhr ad-Din ar-Kazi (d. 606) was writing his great
commentary on the Qur an, the Mafatih al-Gliayb,
" The Keys of the Unseen," and carrying on the work
of al-Ghazzali. The title of his commentary itself
shows the dash of mysticism in his teaching, and he
was in correspondence with Ibn Arabi, the arch-Sufi
of the time. He studied philosophy, too, commented
on works of Ibn Sina, and fought the philosophers
on their own ground as al-Ghazzali had done. Kalam
and philosophy are now, in the eyes of the theolo
gians, a true philosophy and a false. Philosophy
has taken the place of Mu tazilism and the other
heresies. The enemies of the faith are outside its
pale, and the scholasticizing of philosophy goes on
steadily. According to some, a new stage was marked
by al-Baydawi (d. 685), who confused inextricably
philosophy and kalam, but the newness can have
been comparative only. A century later al-Iji (d. 756)
writes a book, al-Mawaqif, on kalam, half of which is
242 THEOLOGY
given to metaphysics and the other half to dogmatics.
At-Taftazani is another name worthy of mention.
He died in 791, after a laborious life as a controver
sialist and commentator. When we reach Ibn Khal-
dun (d. 808), the first philosophical historian and the
greatest until the nineteenth century of our era, we
find that kalam has fallen again from its high estate.
It has become a scholastic discipline, useful only to
repel the attacks of heretics and unbelievers ; and of
heretics, says Ibn Khaldun, there are now none left.
Reason, he goes on, cannot grasp the nature of God ;
cannot weigh His unity nor measure His qualities.
God is unknowable and we must accept what we are
told about Him by His prophets. Such was the re
sult of the destruction of philosophy in Islam.
CHAPTEK V
Islam in the West ; Ibn Tumart and the Muwahhids ; philosophy
in the West under Muwahhid protection ; IbnBajja; Ibn Tu-
fayl ; Ibn Rushd ; Ibn Arabi ; Ibn Sab in.
WE have now anticipated one of the strangest and
most characteristic figures and movements in the
history of Islam. The preceding account, except as
relates to Ibn Khaldun, has told of the triumphs of
the Ash arites in the East only. In the West the
movement was slower, and to it we must now turn.
The Maghrib the Occident, as the Arabs called all
North Africa beyond Egypt had been slow from the
first to take on the Muslim impress. The invading
army had fought its way painfully through, but the
Berber tribes remained only half subdued and one-
tenth Islamized. Egypt was conquered in A.H. 20,
and Samarqand had been reached in 56 ; but it was
not till 74 that the Muslims were at Carthage. And
even then and for long after there arose insurrection
after insurrection, and the national spirit of the Ber
bers remained unbroken. Broadly, but correctly,
Islam in North Africa for more than three centuries
was a failure. The tribal constitutions of the Berbers
were unaffected by the conception of the Khalifate
and their primitive religious aspirations by the Faith
of Muhammad. Not till the possibility came to them
to construct Muslim states out of their own tribes
243
244 THEOLOGY
did their opposition begin to weaken. And then it
was rather political Islam that had weakened. When
the Fatimids conquered Egypt in 356 and moved the
seat of their empire from al-Mahdiya to the newly
founded Cairo, Islam assumed a new meaning for
North Africa. The Fatimid empire there quickly
melted away, and in its place arose several inde
pendent states, Berber in blood though claiming
Arab descent and bearing Arab names. Islam no
longer meant foreign oppression, and it began at last
to make its way. Again, in the preceding period of
insurrection the Berber leaders had frequently ap
peared in the guise and with the claim of prophets,
men miraculously gifted and with a message from
God. These wild tribesmen, with all their fanati
cism for their own tribal liberties, have always been
peculiarly accessible to the genius which claims its
mission from heaven. So they had taken up the
Fatimid cause and worshipped Ubayd Allah the
Mahdi. And so they continued thereafter, and still
continue to be swayed by saints, darwishes, and
prophets of all degrees of insanity and cunning.
The latest case in point is that of the Shaykh as-
Sanusi, with whom we have already dealt. As time
went on, there came a change in these prophet-led
risings and saint-founded states. They gradually
slipped over from being frankly anti-Muhammadan,
if also close imitations of Muhammad s life and
methods, to being equally frankly Muslim. The the
ology of Islam easily afforded them the necessary
point of connection. All that the prophet of the day
need do was to claim the position of the Mahdi, that
IB1ST TUMAET 245
Guided One, who according to the traditions of Mu
hammad was to come before the last day, when the
earth shall be filled with violence, and to fill it again
with righteousness. It was easy for each new Mahdi
to select from the vast and contradictory mass of tra
ditions in Muslim eschatology those which best fitted
his person and his time. To the story and the doc
trine of one of these we now come. L
At the beginning of the sixth century a certain
Berber student of theology, Ibn Tumart by name,
travelled in the East in search of knowledge. An
early and persistent western tradition asserts that he
was a favorite pupil of al-Ghazzali s, and was marked
out by him as showing the signs of a future founder
of empire. This may be taken for what it is worth.
What is certain is that Ibn Tumart went back to the
Maghrib and there brought about the triumph of a
doctrine which was derived, if modified, from that of
the Ash arites. Previously all kalam had been under
a cloud in the West. Theological studies had been
closely limited to fiqli, or canon law, and that of the
narrowed school of Malik ibn Anas. Even the Qur an
and the collections of traditions had come to be neg
lected in favor of systematized law-books. The
revolt of Ibn Hazm against this had apparently ac
complished little. It had been too one-sided and
negative, and had lacked the weight of personality
behind it. Ibn Hazm had assailed the views of
others with a wealth of vituperative language. But
he had been a controversialist only. There is a
story, tolerably well authenticated, that the books of
al-Ghazzali were solemnly condemned by the Qadis
246 THEOLOGY
of Cordova, and burnt in public. Yet, against that
is to be set that all the Spanish theologians did not
approve of this violence.
Ibn Tumart started in life as a reformer of the cor
ruptions of his day, and seems to have slipped from
that into the belief that he had been appointed by
God as the great reformer for all time. As happens
with reformers, from exhortation it came to force ;
from preaching at the abuses of the government to
rebellion against the government. That government,
the Murabit, went down before Ibn Tumart and his
successors, and the pontifical rule of the Muwahhids,
the asserters of God s tawhid or unity, rose in its
place. The doctrine which he preached bears evi
dent marks of the influence of al-Ghazzali and of Ibn
Hazm. Tawhid, for him, meant a complete spirit
ualizing of the conception of God. Opposed to taw-
hid, he set tajsim, the assigning to God of a jism or
body having bulk. Thus, when the theologians of the
West took the anthropomorphic passages of the Qur an
literally, he applied to them the method of ta ivil, or
interpretation, which he had learned in the East, and
explained away these stumbling-blocks. Ibn Hazm,
it will be remembered, resorted to grammatical and
lexicographical devices to attain the same end, and
had regarded ta wil with abhorrence. To Ibn Tumart,
then, this tajsim was flat unbelief and, as Mahdi, it
was his duty to oppose it by force of arms, to lead a
jihad against its maiutainers. Further, with Ibn
Hazm, he agreed in rejecting taqlid. There was only
one truth, and it was man s duty to find it for him
self by going to the original sources.
A ZAHIRITE IMAMITE 247
This is the genuine Zahirite doctrine which utterly
rejects all comity with the four other legal rites ; but
Ibn Tumart, as Mahdi, added another element. It is
based on a very simple Imamite philosophy of his
tory. There has always been an Imam in the world,
a divinely appointed leader, guarded by isma, protec
tion against error. The first four Khalifas were of
such divine appointment ; thereafter came usurpers
and oppressors. Theirs was the reign of wickedness
and lies in the earth. Now he, the Mahdi, was come
of the blood of the Prophet and bearing plainly all
the necessary, accrediting signs to overcome these
tyrants and anti-Christs. He thus was an Imamite,
but stood quite apart from the welter of conflicting
Shi ite sects the Seveners, Twelvers, Zaydites and
the rest as far as do the present Sharifs of Morocco
with their Alid-Sunnite position. The Mahdi, it is
to be remembered, is awaited by Sunnites as by
Shi ites, and is guarded against error as much as an
Imam, since he partakes of the general isma which
in divine things belongs to prophets. Such a leader,
then, could claim from the people absolute obedience
and credence. His word must be for them the
source of truth. There was, therefore, no longer any
need of analogy (qiyas) as a source, and we accord
ingly find that Ibn Tumart rejected it in all but legal
matters and there surrounded it with restrictions.
Analogical argument in things theological was for
bidden.
But where he absolutely parted company from
the Ash arites was with regard to the qualities of
God. In that, too, he followed the view of Ibn
248 THEOLOGY
Hazm sketched above. We must take the Qur aiiic
expressions as names and not as indicating attributes
to us. It is true that his creed shows signs of a phil
osophical width lacking in Ibn Hazm. Like the
Mu tazilites, e.g. Abu Hudhayl, he defines largely by
negations. God is not this ; is not affected by that.
It is even phrased so as to be capable of a pantheistic
explanation, and we find that Ibn Bushd wrote a
commentary on it. But it may be doubted whether
Ibn Tumart was himself a pantheist. All phases of
Islam, as we have seen, ran toward that ; and here
there is only a little indiscretion in the wording.
But it may easily have been that he had besides,
like the Fatimids, a secret teaching or exposition of
those simpler declarations which were intended for
the mass of the people. Among his successors dis
tinct traces of such a thing appear ; both Aristotelian
philosophers and advanced Sufis are connected with
the Muwahhid movement. That, however, belongs
to the sequel.
*" The success of Ibn Tumart, if halting at first, was
eventually complete. As a simple lawyer who felt
called upon to protest as, indeed, are all good Mus
lims in virtue of a tradition from Muhammad
against the abuses of the time, he accomplished com
paratively little. As Mahdi, he and his supporter
and successor, Abd al-Mu min, swept the country.
For his movement was not merely Imamite and Mus
lim, but an expression as well of Berber nationalism.
Here was a man, sprung from their midst, of their
own stock and tongue, who, as Prophet of God, called
them to arms. They obeyed his call, Avorshipped
SYNCRETISM OF IBN TUMART 249
him and fought for him. He translated the Qur an
for them into Berber ; the call to prayers was given
in Berber ; functionaries of the church had to know
Berber; his own theological writings circulated in
Berber as well as in Arabic. As Persia took Islam
and moulded it to suit herself, so now did the Berber
tribes. And a strange jumble they made of it. With
them, the Zahirite system of canon law, rejected by
all other Muslim peoples, enjoyed its one brief period
of power and glory. Shi ite legends and supersti
tions mingled with philosophical free thought. The
book of mystery, al-Jafr, written by Ali, and contain
ing the history of the world to the end of time, was
said to have passed from the custody of al-Ghazzali
at his death to the hands of the Mahdi and was by
him committed to his successors. If only in view of
the syncretism practised by both, it was fitting that
al-Ghazzali and Ibn Tumart should be brought closely
together. Yet it is hard to explain the persistence
with which the great Ash arite is made the teacher
and guide of the semi-Zahirite. There must have
been something, now obscure to us, in their respective
systems which suggested to contemporaries such in
timate connection.
The rule of the Muwahhids lasted until 667, nearly
one hundred years, and involved in its circle of influ
ence many weighty personalities. With some of
these we will now deal shortly.
It has been told above how narrow in general were
the intellectual interests of the West. Canon law,
poetry, history, geography were eagerly pursued, but
little of original value was produced. Originality
250 THEOLOGY
and the breaking of ground in new fields were "under
a ban. Subtilty of thought and luxury of life took
their place. Above all, and naturally, this applied
to philosophy. And so it comes that the first phil
osophic name in the Muslim West is that of Abu
Bakr ibn Bajja, for mediaeval Europe Avenpaoe, who
died comparatively young in 533. For him, as for
all, and still more in the West than in the East, the
problem of the philosopher was how to gain and
maintain a tenable position in a world composed
mostly of the philosophically ignorant and the relig
iously fanatical. This problem had two sides, internal
and external. The inner and the nobler one was how
such a mind could in its loneliness rise to its highest
level and purify itself to the point of knowing things
as they really are and so reach that eternal life in
which the individual spirit loses itself in the Active
Intellect (vovs TTOITJTIKOS, al-aql al-fa"al) which is
above all and behind all. The other, and baser, was
how to so present his views and adapt his life that
the life and the views might be possible in a Muslim
community.
Ibn Bajja was a close disciple of al-Farabi, who is
to be regarded as the spiritual father of the later
Arabic philosophy; Ibn Sina practically falls out.
In logic, physics, and metaphysics he followed al-
Farabi closely. But we can see how the times have
moved and the philosophies with them. The essen
tial differences have appeared and Ibn Bajja can no
longer, with a good conscience, appear as a pious
Muslim. The Sufi strain also is much weaker. The
greatest joy and the closest truth are to be found in
IBN BAJJA 251
thought, and not in the sensuous ecstasies of the
mystic. The intellect is the highest element in man s
being, but is only immortal as it joins itself to the
one Active Intellect, which is all that is left of God.
Here we have the beginning of the doctrine which,
later, under the name of Averroism and pampsychisrn
ran like wild-fire through the schools of Europe.
Further, only by the constant exercise of its own
functions can the intellect of man be thus raised. He
must live rationally at all points ; be able to give a
reason for every action. This may compel him to
live in solitude ; the world is so irrational and will
not suffer reason. Or some of the disciples of reason
may draw together and form a community where they
may live the calm life of nature and of the pursuit of
knowledge and self-development. So they will be at
one with nature and the eternal, and far removed
from the frenzied life of the multitude with its lower
aims and conceptions. It is easy to see how the iron
of a fight against overwhelming odds had entered this
soul. Only the friendship of some of the Murabit
princes saved him ; but he died in the end, says a
story, by poison.
With the next names we find ourselves at a Mu-
wahhid court, and there the atmosphere has changed.
It is evident that, whatever might be the temper of
the people, the chiefs of the Muwahhids viewed phi
losophy with no disfavor. Their problem, as in the
case of the Fatimids, seems rather to have been how
much the people might be taught with safety. Their
solution of the problem here we proceed on conject
ure, but the basis is tolerably sound was that the bulk
252 THEOLOGY
of the people should be taught nothing but the literal
sense of the Qur an, metaphors, anthropomorphisms
and all ; that the educated lay public, which had al
ready some inkling of the facts, should be assured
that there was really no difference between philosophy
and theology that they were two phases of one truth ;
and that the philosophers should have a free hand
to go on their own way, always provided that their
speculations did not spread beyond their own circle
and agitate the minds of the commonalty. It was a
beautiful scheme, but like all systems of obscurantism
it did not work. On the one hand, the people re
fused to be blindfolded, and, on the other, philosophy
died out of inanition.
In accordance with this, we find the Muwahhid
chiefs installing the Zahirite fqli as the official system
and sternly stopping all speculative discussing cither
of canon law or of theology. " The Word so stands
written ; take it or the sword," is the significant utter
ance which has come to us from Abu Ya qub (reg.
558-580), son of Abd al-Mu min. The same continued
under his son Abu Yusuf al-Mansur (reg. 580-595),
who added a not very carefully concealed contempt
for the Mahdiship of Ibn Tumart. All such things
were ridiculous in his philosophic eyes.
Under these men and in adjustment with their
system lived and worked Ibn Tufayl and Ibn Rushd,
the last of the great Aristotelians. Ibn Tufayl was
wazir and physician to Abu Ya qub and died a year
after him, in 531. His was a calm, contemplative
life, secluded in princely libraries. But his objects
were the same as those of Ibn Bajja. He has evi-
IBN TUFAYL 253
dently no hope that the great body of the people can
ever be brought to the truth. A religion, sensuous
and sensual alike, is needed to restrain the wild beast
in man, and the masses should be left to the guidance
of that religion. For a philosopher to seek to teach
them better is to expose himself to peril and them to
the loss of that little which they have. But in his
methods, on the other hand,Ibn Tufayl is essentially
at one with al-Ghazzali. He is a mystic who seeks
in Sufi exercises, in the constant purifying of mind
and body and in the unwearying search for the one
unity in the individual multiplicity around him, to
find a way to lose his self in that eternal and one
spirit which for him is the divine. So at last he
comes to ecstasy and reaches those things which eye
hath not seen nor ear heard. The only difference be
tween him and al-Ghazzali is that al-Ghazzali was a
theologian and saw in his ecstasy Allah upon His
throne and around Him the things of the heavens, as
set forth in the Qur an, while Ibn Tufayl was a phi
losopher, of neo-Platonic H- Aristotelian stamp, and
saw in his ecstasy the Active Intellect and Its chain
of causes reaching down to man and back to Itself.
The book by which his name has lived, and which
has had strange haps, is the romance of Hayy ibn
Yaqzan, " The Living One, Son of the "Waking One."
In it he conceives two islands, the one inhabited and
the other not. On the inhabited island we have con
ventional people living conventional lives, and re
strained by a conventional religion of rewards and
punishments. Two men there, Salaman and Asal,
have raised themselves to a higher level of self-rule.
254 THEOLOGY
Salainan adapts himself externally to the popular re
ligion and rules the people ; Asal, seeking to perfect
himself still further in solitude, goes to the other
island. But there he finds a man, Hayy ibn Yaqzan,
who has lived alone from infancy and has gradually,
by the innate and uncorrupted powers of the mind,
developed himself to the highest philosophic level
and reached the Vision of the Divine. He has passed
through all the stages of knowledge until the universe
lies clear before him, and now he finds that his phi
losophy thus reached, without prophet or revelation,
and the purified religion of Asal are one and the
same. The story told by Asal of the people of the
other island sitting in darkness stirs his soul and he
goes forth to them as a missionary. But he soon
learns that the method of Muhammad was the true
one for the great masses, and that only by sensuous
allegory and concrete things could they be reached
and held. He retires to his island again to live the
solitary life.
The bearing of this on the system of the Muwah-
hids cannot be mistaken. If it is a criticism of the
finality of historical revelation, it is also a defence of
the attitude of the Muwahhids toward both people
and philosophers. By the favor of Abu Ya qub, Ibn
Tufayl had practically been able to live on an island
and develop himself by study. So, too, Abu Ya qub
might stand for the enlightened but practical Sala
inan. Yet the meaning evidently is that between
them they failed and must fail. There could only be a
solitary philosopher here and there, and happy for
him if he found a princely patron. The people which
IBN KUSHD 255
knew not the truth were accursed. Perhaps, rather,
they were children and had to be humored and
guided as such in an endless childhood.
It is evident that such a solitary possessor of truth
had two courses open to him. He could either busy
himself in his studies and exercises, as had done Ibn
Bajja and Ibn Tufayl, or he could boldly enter public
life and trust to his dialectic ingenuity and resource
perhaps, also, to his plasticity of conscience to
carry him past all whispers of heresy and unbelief.
The latter course was chosen by Ibn Eushd. He was
born at Cordova, in 520, of a family of jurists and
there studied law. From his legal studies only a
book on the law of inheritance has reached us, and it,
though frequently commented on, has never been
printed. In 548 he was presented to Abu Ya qub
by Ibn Tufayl and encouraged by him in the study
of philosophy. In it his greatest work was done.
In spite of the shreds and patches of neo-Platonism
which clung to him, he was the greatest mediaeval
commentator on Aristotle. It is only part of the
eternal puzzle of the Muslim mind that the utility of
Greek for a student of Aristotle seems never to have
struck him. Thereafter he acted as judge in differ
ent places in Spain and was court physician for a
short time in 578 to Abu Ya qub. In 575 he had
written his tractates, to which we shall come imme
diately, mediating between philosophy and theology.
Toward the end of his life he was condemned by
Abu Yusuf al-Mansur for heresy and banished from
Cordova. This was in all likelihood a truckling on the
part of al-Mansur to the religious prejudices of the
256 THEOLOGY
people of Spain, who were probably of stiffer ortho
doxy than the Berbers. He was in Spain, at Cor
dova, at the time, and was engaged in carrying on a
religious war with the Christians. On his return to
Morocco the decree of exile was recalled and Ibn
Eushd restored to favor. We find him again at the
court in Morocco, and he died there in 595.
This is not the place to enter upon Ibn Rushd s
philosophical system. He was a thorough-going Aris
totelian, as he knew Aristotle. That was probably
much better than any of his predecessors ; but even
he had not got clear from the fatal influence of Plo-
tinus. Above all, he is essentially a theologian just
as much as they. In Aristotle there had been given
what was to all intents a philosophical revelation.
Only in the knowledge and acceptance of it could
truth and life be found. And some must reach it ;
one at least there must always be. If a thing is not
seen by someone it has existed in vain ; which is
impossible. If someone at least does not know the
truth, it also has existed in vain, which is still more
impossible. That is Ibn Bushd s way of saying that
the esse is the percipi and that there must be a per-
ceiver. And he has unlimited faith in his means of
reaching that Truth only by such capitalization can
we express his theologic attitude. The logic of Aris
totle is infallible and can break through to the su
preme good itself. Ecstasy and contemplation play
no part with him ; there he separates from Ibn Tu-
fayl. Such intercourse with the Active Intellect may
exist ; but it is too rare to be taken into account.
Obviously, Ibn Eushd himself, who to himself was
ATTACK ON AL-GHAZZALI 257
the percipient of truth for his age, had never reached
that perception. Solitary meditation he cannot away
with ; for him the market-place and contact with
men ; there he parts with Ibn Bajja. In truth, he is
nearer to the life in life of Ibn Sina, and that, per
haps, explains his constant attacks on the Persian
bon vivant.
All his predecessors he joys in correcting, but his
especial bete noire is al-Ghazzali. With him it is war on
life or death. He has two good causes. One is al-Ghaz
zali s " Destruction of the Philosophers ; " of it, Ibn
Eushd, in his turn, writes a " Destruction." This is
a clever, incisive criticism, luminous with logical ex
actitude, yet missing al-Ghazzali s vital earnestness
and incapable of reaching his originality. But al-
Ghazzali had not only attacked the philosophers;
he had also spread the knowledge of their teachings
and reasonings, and had said that there was nothing
esoteric and impossible of grasp in them for the
ordinary mind. He had thus assailed the funda
mental principles of the Muwahhid system. Against
this, Ibn Rushd wrote the tractates spoken of above.
They were evidently addressed to the educated laity ;
not to the ignorant multitude, but to those who had
already read such books as those of al-Ghazzali and
been affected by them, yet had not studied philosophy
at first hand. That they were not intended for such
special students is evident from the elaborate care
that is taken in them to conceal, or, if that were not
possible, to put a good face upon obnoxious doc
trines. Thus, his philosophy left no place in reality
for a system of rewards and punishments or even for
258 THEOLOGY
any individual existence of the soul after death, for a
creation of the material world, or for a providence in
the direct working of the supreme being on earth.
But all these points are involved or glossed over in
these tractates.
Further, it is plain that their object was to bring
about a reform of religion in itself, and also of the
attitude of theologians to students of philosophy. In
them he sums up his own position under four heads :
First, that philosophy agrees with religion and that
religion recommends philosophy. Here, he is fight
ing for his life. Religion is true, a revelation from
God ; and philosophy is true, the results reached by
the human mind ; these two truths cannot contradict
each other. Again, men are frequently exhorted in
the Qur an to reflect, to consider, to speculate about
things ; that means the use of the intelligence, which
follows certain laws, long ago traced and worked out
by the ancients. We must, therefore, study their
works and proceed further on the same course our
selves, i.e., we must study philosophy.
Second, there are two things in religion, literal
meaning and interpretation. If we find anything in
the Qur an which seems externally to contradict the
results of philosophy, we may be quite sure that
there is something under the surface. We must look
for some possible interpretation of the passage, some
inner meaning ; and we shall certainly find it.
Third, the literal meaning is the duty of the mul
titude, and interpretation the duty of scholars. Those
who are not capable of philosophical reasoning must
hold the literal truth of the different statements in
THE MULTIFORM TRUTH 259
the Qur an. The imagery must be believed by them
exactly as it stands, except where it is absolutely evi
dent that we have only an image. On the other hand,
philosophers must be given the liberty of interpret
ing as they choose. If they find it necessary, from
some philosophical necessity, to adopt an allegorical
interpretation of any passage or to find in it a meta
phor, that liberty must be open to them. There must
be no laying down of dogmas by the church as to
what may be interpreted and what may not. In Ibn
Eushd s opinion, the orthodox theologians sometimes
interpreted when they should have kept by the letter,
and sometimes took literally passages in which they
should have found imagery. He did not accuse them
of heresy for this, and they should grant him the
same libert}^.
Fourth, those who know are not to be allowed to
communicate interpretations to the multitude. So
Ali said, " Speak to the people of that which they
understand ; would ye that they give the lie to God
and His messenger ? " Ibn Rushd considered that
belief was reached by three different classes of people
in three different ways. The many believe because
of rhetorical syllogisms (Jchitabiya), i.e., those whose
premises consist of the statements of a religious
teacher (maqbulaf), or are presumptions (maznunaf).
Others believe because of controversial syllogisms
(jadliya), which are based on principles (mashhurat)
or admissions (musallamaf). All these premises be
long to the class of propositions which are not abso
lutely certain. The third class, and by far the
smaller, consists of the people of demonstration (bur-
260 THEOLOGY
liari). Their belief is based upon syllogisms com
posed of propositions which are certain. These
consist of axioms (aivwaliyat) and five other classes
of certainties. Each of these three classes of people
has to be treated in the way that suits its mental
character. It is wrong to put demonstration or con
troversy before those who can understand only rhe
torical reasoning. It destroys their faith and gives
them nothing to take its place. The case is similar
with those who can only reach controversial reason
ing but cannot attain unto demonstration. Thus Ibn
Rushd would have the faith of the multitude care
fully screened from all contact with the teachings of
philosophers. Such books should not be allowed to
go into general circulation, and if necessary, the civil
authorities should step in to prevent it. If these
principles were accepted and followed, a return
might be looked for of the golden age of Islam, when
there was no theological controversy and men be
lieved sincerely and earnestly.
On this last paragraph it is worth noticing that its
threefold distinction is " conveyed " by Ibn Bushd
from a little book belonging to al-Ghazzali s later
life, after he had turned to the study of tradition,
Iljam al-Awamm an Urn al-Jcalam, " The reining in
of the commonalty from the science of kalam."
Such was, practically, the end of the Muslim Aris
totelians. Some flickers of philosophic study doubt
less remained. So we find a certain Abu-1-Hajjaj ibn
Tumlus (d. 620) writing on Aristotle s "Analytics,"
and the tractates of Ibn Bushd described above were
copied at Almeria in 724. But the fate of all Muslim
IBN AKABI 261
speculation fell, and this school went out in Sufiism.
It was not Ibn Kushd that triumphed but Ibn Tuf ayl,
and that side of Ibn Tufayl which was akin to al-
Ghazzali. From this point on, the thinkers and
writers of Islam become mystics more and more over
whelmingly. Dogmatic theology itself falls behind,
and of philosophical disciplines only formal logic
and a metaphysics of the straitest scholastic type
are left. Philosophy becomes the handmaid of the
ology, and a very mechanical handmaid at that. It
is only in the schools of the Sufis that we find real
development and promise of life. The future lay
with them, however dubious it may seem to us that a
future in such charge must be.
The greatest Sufi in the Arabic-speaking world was
undoubtedly Muhyi ad-Din ibn Arabi. He was born
in Murcia in 560, studied hadith and fiqli at Seville,
and in 598 set out to travel in the East. He wan
dered through the Hijaz, Mesopotamia and Asia
Minor, and died at Damascus in 638, leaving behind
him an enormous mass of writings, at least 150 of
which have come down to us. "Why he left Spain is
unknown ; it is plain that he was under the influence
of the Muwahhid movement. He was a Zahirite in
law ; rejected analogy, opinion, and taqlid y but ad
mitted agreement. His attachment to the opinions
of Ibn Hazm especially was very strong. He edited
some of that scholar s works, and was only prevented
by his objections to taqlid from being a formal Hazm-
ite. But with all that literalness in fiqli, his mysti
cism in theology was of the most rampant and luxu
rious description. Between the two sides, it is true,
262 THEOLOGY
there existed a connection of a kind. He had no
need for analogy or opinion or for any of the work
ings of the vain human intelligence so long as the
divine light was flooding his soul and he saw the
things of the heavens with plain vision. So his
books are a strange jumble of theosophy and meta
physical paradoxes, all much like the theosophy of
our own day. He evidently took the system of the
inutakallims and played with it by means of formal
logic and a lively imagination. To what extent he
was sincere in his claim of heavenly illuminings and
mysterious powers it would be hard to say. The
oriental mystic has little difficulty in deceiving him
self. His opinions so far as we can know them
may be briefly sketched as follows : The being of
all things is God : there is nothing except Him. All
things are an essential unity ; every part of the world
is the whole world. So man is a unity in essence
but a multiplicity in individuals. His anthropology
was an advance upon that of al-Ghazzali toward a
more unflinching pantheism. He has the same view
that the soul of man is a spiritual substance different
from everything else and proceeding from God. But
he obliterates the difference of God and makes souls
practically emanations. At death these return into
God who sent them forth. All religions to Ibn
Arabi were practically indifferent ; in them all the
divine was working and was worshipped. Yet Islam
is the more advantageous and Sufiism is its true phi
losophy. Further, man has no free-will ; he is con
strained by the will of God, which is really all that
exists. Nor is there any real difference between
IBN SAB IN 263
good and evil ; the essential unity of all things makes
such a division impossible.
The last of the Muwahhid circle with whom we
need deal and, perhaps, absolutely the last is Abd
al-Haqq ibn Sab in. He was as much a mystic as
Ibn Arabi, but was apparently more deeply read in
philosophy and did not cast his conceptions in so
theological and Qur anic a mould. He, too, was born
in Murcia about 613, and must very early have
founded a school of his own, gathered disciples
round him and established a wide reputation. High
skill in alchemy, astrology, and magic is ascribed to
him, which probably means that he claimed to be a
wall, a friend of God, gifted with miraculous powers.
He is accused of posing as a prophet, although in
orthodox Islam Muhammad is the last and the seal of
the prophets But against this, it may be said that
he had no need of the actual title, " prophet " ; many
mystics held heretically, it is true that the wall
stood higher than the prophet, nabi or rasul. He
had evidently besides this a more solid reputation
in philosophy, as is shown by his correspondence
with Frederick II, the great Hohenstaufen (d. 1250
A.D.). The story is told on the Muslim side only,
but has vraisemblance and seems to be tolerably
authentic. According to it, Frederick addressed
certain questions in philosophy on the eternity
of the world, the nature of the soul, the number
and nature of the categories, etc. to different Muslim
princes, begging that they would submit them to
their learned men. So the questions came to ar-
Eashid, the Muwahhid (reg. 630-640), addressed to
264 THEOLOGY
Ibn Sab in as a scholar whose reputation had reached
even the Sicilian court. Ar-Eashid passed them on ;
Ibn Sab in accepted the commission with a smile
this is the Muslim account and triumphantly and
contemptuously expounded the difficulties of the
Christian monarch and student. In his replies he
certainly displays a very complete and exact knowl
edge of the Aristotelian and neo-Platonic systems,
and is far less a blind follower of Aristotle than is
Ibn Eushd. But his schoolmasterly tone is most
unpleasant, and we discover in the end that all this
is a mere preliminary discipline, leading in itself to
agnosticism and a recognition that there is nothing
but vanity in this world, and that only in the Vision
of the Sufi can certainty and peace be found. So we
have again the circle through which al-Gha^zali went.
As distinguished from Ibn Eushd, the prophet, with
Ibn Sab in, takes higher rank than the sage. Be
yond the current division of the soul into the vege
tative, the animal and the reasonable, he adds two
others, derived from the reasonable, the soul of wis
dom and the soul of prophecy. The first of these is
the soul of the philosopher, and the other of the
prophet ; and the last is the highest. Of the reason
able soul upward, he predicates immortality.
His position otherwise must have been practically
the same as that of Ibn Arabi. Like him he was a
Zahirite in law and a mystic in theology. " God is
the reality of existing things," he taught, and it is
evident that he belonged to the school of pantheism
in which God is all, and separate things are emana
tions from him. In life we have flashes of recogni-
END OF THE MUWAHHIDS 265
tion of the heavenly realities, but only at death
which is our true birth do we reach union with the
eternal, or, to speak technically, with the Active Intel
lect.
Apparently it was quite possible for him to hold
these views in public so long as the Muwahhids were
strong enough to protect him. But their empire was
rapidly falling to pieces and the time of freedom had
passed. An attack on him at Tunis, where the Haf-
sids now ruled, drove him to the East about 643, and
there he took refuge at of all places Mecca. The
refuge seems to have been secure. He lived there
more than twenty years amid a circle of disciples,
among whom was the Sharif himself, and died about
667. There is a poorly authenticated story that he
died by suicide. The man himself, with so many of
his time and kind, must remain a puzzle to us. For
all his haughty pride of learning, it is noted of him
that his first disciples were from among the poor.
His contemporaries described him as "a Sufi after
the manner of the philosophers." The last vestige
of the Muwahhid empire passed away in the year of
his death.
CHAPTEE VI
The rise and spread of darwish Fraternities ; the survival and tradi
tion of the Hanbalite doctrine ; Abd ar-Razzaq ; Ibn Taymiya,
his attacks on saint-worship and on the mutakallims ; ash-
Sha rani and his times ; the modern movements ; Wahhabism
and the influence of al-Ghazzali; possibilities of the present
OUR sources now begin to grow more and more
scanty, and we must hasten over long intervals of
time and pass with little connection from one name
to another. Preliminary investigations are also to
a great extent lacking, and it is possible that the cen
turies which we shall merely touch may have wit
nessed developments only less important than those
with which we have already dealt. But that is not
probable ; for when, after a long silence, the curtain
rises again for us in the twelfth Muslim century, we
shall find at work only those elements and conditions
whose inception and growth we have now set forth.
One name in our rapid flight deserves mention, at
least. It is that of Umar ibn al-Farid, the greatest
poet that Arabic mysticism has produced. He was
born at Cairo in 586, lived for a time at Mecca, and
died at Cairo in 632. He led no new movement or
advance, but the East still cherishes his memory and
his poems.
We have already noticed (p. 177) the beginnings of
darwish Fraternities and the founding of monasteries
or khanqahs. During the period over which we have
266
DAK WISH FRATERNITIES 267
just passed, these received a great and enduring im
petus. The older ascetics and walls gathered round
them groups of personal followers and their pupils
carried on their names. But it was long, apparently,
before definite corporations were founded of fixed
purpose to perpetuate the memory of their masters.
One of the earliest of these seems to have been
the fraternity of Qadirite darwishes, founded by Abd
al-Qadir al-Jilani, who died in 561 at Baghdad, where
pilgrimage is still made to his shrine. So, too, the
Eifa ite Fraternity was founded at Baghdad by Ah
mad ar-Rifa a in 576. Another s that of the Sha-
dhilites, named after their founder, ash-Shadhili, who
died in 656. Again another is that of the Badawites,
whose founder was Ahmad al-Badawi (d. 675) ; his
shrine at Tanta in Lower Egypt is still one of the
most popular places of pilgrimage. Again, the order
of the Naqshbandite darwishes was founded by Mu
hammad an-Naqshbandi, who died in 791. Among
the Turks by far the most popular religious order is
that of the Mawlawites, founded by the great Persian
mystical poet, Jalal ad-Din ar-Eumi (d. 672), whose
Mesnevi is read over all Islam. These and very many
others, especially of later date, are still in existence.
Others, once founded, have again become extinct.
Thus, Ibn Sab in, though he was surrounded by dis
ciples who for a time after his death carried on the
order of Sab inites, does not seem now to have any
to do him honor. The same holds of a certain Adi
al-Ha#[ari who founded a cloister near Mawsil and
died about 558. It is significant that al-Ghazzali,
though he founded a cloister for Sufis at Tus and
268 THEOLOGY
taught and governed there himself, left no order be
hind him. Apparently in his time the movement
toward continuous corporations had not yet begun.
It is true that there are at present in existence dar-
wish Fraternities which claim to be descended from
the celebrated ascetics and ivalis, Ibrahim ibn Adham
(d. 161), Sari as-Saqati (d. 257) and Abu Yazid al-
Bistami (d. 261), but it may be gravely doubted
whether they can show any sound pedigree. The
legend of Shaykh Ilwan, who is said to have founded
the first order in 49, may be safely rejected. It is
significant that the Awlad Ilwan, sons of Ilwan, as
his followers are called, form a sect of the Rifa ites.
Further, just as the Sufis have claimed for themselves
all the early pious Muslims, and especially the ten
to whom Muhammad made specific promise of Para
dise (al-asliara al-mubashshara), so these Fraternities
are ascribed in their origin to, and put under the
guardianship of the first Khalifas, and, in Egypt at
least, a direct descendant of Abu Bakr holds author
ity over all their orders.
In these orders all are darwishes, but only those
gifted by God with miraculous powers are ivalis.
Those of them who are begging friars are faqirs.
They stand under an elaborate hierarchy grading in
dignity and holiness from the Qutb, or Axis, who
wanders, often invisible and always unknown to the
world, through the lands performing the duties of
his office, and who has a favorite station on the
roof of the Ka ba, through his naqibs or assistants,
down to the lowest faqir. But the members of these
orders are not exclusively faqirs. All classes are
MYSTICS V. TRADITIONALISTS 269
enrolled as, in a sense, lay adherents. Certain trades
affect certain fraternities ; in Egypt, for example, the
fishermen are almost all Qadirites and walk in pro
cession on their festival day, carrying colored nets as
their banners. Much the same thing held, and holds,
of the monastic orders of Europe, but the Muslim
does not wait till he is dying to put on the weeds
of Ahmad al-Badawi or ash-Shadhili. Finally, ref
erence may be made again to the last and most
important of all these orders, the militant Brother
hood of as-Sanusi.
We have now returned to the period of al-Iji
and at-Taftazani, when philosophy definitely de
scended from the throne and became the servant
and defender of theology. From this time on, the
two independent forces at work are the unveiling of
the mystic (kashf) and tradition (naql). The only
place for reason (aql) now is to prove the possibility
of a given doctrine. That done, its actual truth is
proven by tradition. These two then, kashf and
naql, hold the field, and the history of Muslim theol
ogy from this point to the present day is the history of
their conflicts. The mystics are accused of heresy by
the traditionalists. The traditionalists are accused
by the mystics of formalism, hypocrisy, and, above
all, of flat inability to argue logically. Both accusa
tions are certainly true. No fine fence on person
ality can conceal the fact that Muslim mysticism is
simple pantheism of the Plotinian type, the individ
uals are emanations from the One. On the other
hand, the formalism of the traditionalists can hardly
be exaggerated. They pass over almost entirely into
270 THEOLOGY
canon lawyers, meriting richly the fine sarcasm ol al-
Ghazzali, who asked the faqilis of his day what pos
sible value for the next world could lie in a study of
the Qur anic law of inheritance or the like. Tradi
tion (haditli), in the exact sense of the sayings and
doings of Muhammad, falls into the background,
and fiqh, the systems built upon it by the genera
tions of lawyers, from the four masters down, takes
its place. Again, the accusation of illogical reason
ing is also thoroughly sound. The habit of unend
ing subdivision deprived the minds of the canonists
of all breadth of scope, and their devotion to the
principle of acceptance on authority (taqlid) weak
ened their feeling for argument. It is true, further,
that the mystics, such as they were, had heired all
the philosophy left in Islam, and were thus become
the representatives of the intellectual life. They
had so much of an advantage over their more or
thodox opponents. But the intellectual life with
them, as with the earlier philosophers, remained of
a too subjective character. The fatal study of the
self, and the self only that tramping along the high
a priori road and neglect of the objective study
of the outside world which ruined their forerunners,
was their ruin as well. Outbursts of intellectual
energy and revolt we may meet with again and
again ; there will be few sigus of that science which
seeks facts patiently in the laboratory, the observa
tory, and the dissecting-room.
Curiously enough, there fall closely together at
this time the death dates of two men of the most
opposite schools. The one was Ibn Taymiya, the
ABD AR-KAZZAQ 271
anthropomorphist free lance, who died in 728, and
the other was Abd ar-Eazzaq, the pantheistic Sufi,
who died in 730. Abd ar-Kazzaq of Samarqand and
Kashan was a close student and follower of Ibn
Arabi. He commented on his books and defended
his orthodoxy. In fact, so closely had Ibn Arabi
come to be identified with the Sufi position as a
whole that a defence of him was a favorite form in
which to cast a defence of Sufiism generally. But
Abd ar-Eazzaq did not follow his master absolutely.
On the freedom of the will especially he left him.
For Ibn Arabi, the doctrine of the oneness of all
things had involved fatalism. Whatever happens is
determined by the nature of things, that is, by the
nature of God. So the individuals are bound by the
whole. Abd ar-Kazzaq turned this round. His
pantheism was of the same type as that of Ibn Arabi ;
God, for him, was all. But there is freedom of the
divine nature, he went on. It must therefore exist
in man also, for he is an emanation from the divine.
His every act, it is true, is predetermined, in time, in
form, and in place. But his act is brought about by
certain causes, themselves predetermined. These
are what we would call natural laws in things, natural
abilities, aptitudes, etc., in the agent ; finally, free
choice itself. And that free choice is in man because
he is of and from God. Further, it is evident that
Abd ar-Eazzaq s anxiety is to preserve a basis for
morals. Among the predetermining causes he reck
ons the divine commands, warnings, proofs in the
Qur an. The guidance of religion finds thus its place
and the prophets their work. But what of the exist-
272 THEOLOGY
ence of evil and the necessity of restraint in a world
that has emanated from the divine? This problem
he faces bravely. Our world must be the best of all
possible worlds ; otherwise God would have made it
better. Difference, then, among men and things be
longs to its essence and necessity. Next, justice must
consist in accepting these different things and adapt
ing them to their situations. To try to make all
things and men alike would be to leave some out of
existence altogether. That would be a great injus
tice. Here, again, religion enters. Its object is to
rectify this difference in qualities and gifts. Men
are not responsible for these, but they are responsible
if they do not labor to correct them. In the hereafter
all will be reabsorbed into the divine being and taste
such bliss as the rank of each deserves. For those
who need it there will be a period of purgatorial
chastisement, but that will not be eternal, in sha
Allah.
Like his predecessors, Abd ar-Bazzaq divides men
into classes according to their insight into divine
things. The first is of men of the world, who are
ruled by the flesh (nafs) and who live careless of all
religion. The second is of men of reason (aql). They
through the reason contemplate God, but see only
His external attributes. The third is of men of the
spirit (ruh) who, in ecstasy, see God face to face in
His very essence, which is the substrate of all cre
ation.
In his cosmogony, Abd ar-Bazzaq follows, of
course, the neo-Platonic model and shows great inge
nuity in weaving into it the crude and materialistic
IBN TAYMIYA 273
phrases and ideas of the Qur an. Like all Muslim
thinkers he displays an anxiety to square with his
philosophy the terms dear to the multitude.
To Ibn Taymiya all this was the very abomination
of desolation itself. He had no use for mystics,
philosophers, Ash arite theologians, or, in fact, for
anyone except himself. A contemporary described
him as a man most able and learned in many sci
ences, but with a screw loose. However it may have
been about the last point, there can be no question
that he was the reviver for his time and the trans
mitter to our time of the genuine Hanbalite tradi
tion, and that his work rendered possible the Wah-
habites and the Brotherhood of as-Sanusi. He was
the champion of the religion of the multitude as op
posed to that of the educated few with which we have
been dealing so long. This popular theology had
been going steadily upon its way and producing its
regular riots and disputings. It is related of a cer
tain Ash arite doctor, Fakhr ad-Din ibn Asakir (d.
620), that, in Damascus, he never dared to pass by a
certain way through fear of Hanbalite violence. The
same Fakhr ad-Din once gave, as in duty bound, the
normal salutation of the Peace to a Hanbalite theolo
gian. The Hanbalite did not return it, which was
more than a breach of courtesy, and indicated that
he did not regard Fakhr ad-Din as a Muslim. When
people remonstrated with him, he turned it as a the
ological jest and replied, " That man believes in
Speech in the Mind (kalam nafsi, haditJi fi-n-nafs\
so I returned his salutation mentally." The point is
a hit at the Ash arites, who contended that thought
274 THEOLOGY
was a kind of speech without letters or sounds, and
that God s quality of Speech could therefore be with
out letters or sounds.
But even the simple orthodoxy of the populace
had not remained unchanged. It had received a vast
accretion of the most multifarious superstitions. The
cult of saints, alive and dead, of holy sites, trees, gar
ments, and the observance of all manner of days and
seasons had been developing parallel to the advance
of Sufiism among the educated. The ivalis were un
tiring in the recital of the karamat which God had
worked for them, and the populace drank in the
wonders greedily. The metaphysical and theological
side they left untouched. "This is a holy man,"
they said, " who can work miracles ; we must fear
and serve him." And so they would do without
much thought whether his morality might not be an-
tinomian and his theology pantheistic. To abate this
and other evils and bring back the faith of the
fathers was the task which Ibn Taymiya took up.
He was born near Damascus in 661 and educated
as a Hanbalite. His family had been Hanbalite for
generations, and he himself taught in that school and
was reckoned as the greatest Hanbalite of his time.
His position, too, was practically that of Ahmad ibn
Hanbal, modified by the necessities imposed by new
controversaries. Thus he was an anthropomorphist,
but of what exact shade is obscure. He was accused
of teaching that God was above His throne, could be
pointed at, and that He descended from His seat as
a man might, i.e., that He was in space. But he
certainly distinguished himself from the crasser ma-
A MCJJTAHID 275
terialists. He refused to be classed as the adherent
of any school or of any system save that of Muham
mad and the agreement of the fathers. He claimed
for himself the rights of a mujtahid and went back to
first sources and principles in everything. His self-
confidence was extreme, and he smote down with
proud words the Eightly Guided Khalifas, Umar and
Ali, themselves. His bases were Qur an, tradition
from the Prophet and from the Companions and anal
ogy. Agreement, in the broad sense of the agree
ment of the Muslim people, he rejected. If he had
accepted it he would have been forced to accept in
numerable superstitions, beliefs, and practices espe
cially the whole doctrine of the walls and their won
ders for their basis was agreement. The agree
ment of the Companions he did accept, while con
victing them right and left of error as individuals.
His life was filled up with persecutions and misfort
une. He was a popular idol, and inquiries for his
judgment on theological and canonical questions kept
pouring in upon him. If there was no inquiry, and
he felt that a situation called for an expression of
opinion from him, he did not hesitate to send it out
with all formality. It is true that it is the duty of
every Muslim, so far as he can, to do away or at
least to denounce any illegality or unorthodox view or
practice which he may observe. This duty evi
dently weighed heavily on Ibn Taymiya, and there
was fear at one time at the Mamluk court lest he
might go the way of Ibn Tumart. In one of these
utterances he defined the doctrine of God s qualities
as Ibn Hazm had done, and joined thereto denuncia-
276 THEOLOGY
tions of the Ash arite kalam and of the Qur anic exe
gesis of the mutakallims as a whole. They were
nothing but the heirs and scholars of philosophers,
idolaters, Magians, etc. ; and yet they dared to go
beyond the Prophet and his heirs and Companions.
The consequence of this fatwa or legal opinion was
that he was silenced for a time as a teacher. On
another occasion he gave out & fatwa on divorce, pro
nouncing talilil illegal. Tahlil is a device by which
an awkward section in the canon law is evaded. If a
man divorces his wife three times, or pronounces a
threefold divorce formula, he cannot remarry her until
she has been married to another man, has cohabited
with him and been divorced by him. Muslim ideas
of sexual purity are essentially different from ours,
and the custom has grown up, when a man has thus
divorced his wife in hasty anger, of employing another
to marry her on pledge of divorcing her again next
day. Sometimes the man so employed refuses to
carry out his contract ; such refusal is a frequent
motif in oriental tales. To avoid this, the husband
not infrequently employs one of his slaves and then
presents him to his former wife the next day. A
slave can legally marry a free woman, but when he
becomes her property the marriage is ipso facto
annulled, because a slave cannot be the husband of
his mistress or a slave woman the wife of her master.
It is to Ibn Taymiya s credit that he was one of the
few to lift up their voices against this abomination.
His independence is shown at its best.
But it was with the Sufis that he had his worst con
flicts, and at their hands he suffered most. In many
CONTROVERSY WITH SUFIS 277
points his career is parallel to that of Ahmad ibn
Hanbal, the Sufi movement taking the place that was
played by Mu tazilism in the life of the earlier saint.
One great difference, it may be remarked, was that al-
Ma mun urged the persecution of Ibn Hanbal, while
an-Nasir, the great Mamluk Sultan (reg. 693, 698-
708, 709-741), supported Ibn Taymiya as far as he
possibly could. The beginning of the Sufi contro
versy was characteristic. Ibn Taymiya heard that a
certain an-Nasr al-Manbiji (d. 719 ? ), a reputed fol
lower of Ibn Arabi and of Ibn Sab in, had reached a
position of influence in Cairo. That was enough to
make Ibn Taymiya address an epistle to him, in
tended to turn him from his heresies. It is needless
to give in detail the position and content of the
epistle. He wrote as a strong monotheist of the old-
fashioned type and exposed and assailed unmercifully
the doctrine of Unity (ittihad) of the mystics. Al-
Manbiji retorted with countercharges of heresy, and,
as he had behind him all the Sufis of Egypt as
great an army as the Christian monks and ascetics or
earlier Egypt and much like to them Ibn Taymiya
had to pay for his eagerness for a fight with long and
painful imprisonment at Cairo, Alexandria and Da
mascus. Here it is evident that he had lost touch with
the drift of popular, and especially Egyptian, feeling.
But his fearlessness was like that of Ibn Hanbal
himself, and in 726 he gave out a fatwa which ran
still straighter in the teeth of the beliefs of the peo
ple and which sent him to a prison which he never left
alive. It had long been a custom in Islam to make
pious pilgrimage to the graves of saints and prophets
278 THEOLOGY
and there to do reverence to their memory and to
ask their aid. It was part of that cult of saints
which had so overspread and overcome the earlier
simplicity of Islam. The most outstanding case in
point was, and is, the pilgrimage to the tomb of Mu
hammad at al-Madina, which has come to be a more
or less essential part of the Hajj to the Ka ba itself.
Against all this Ibn Taymiya lifted a voice of em
phatic protest. These shrines were in great part
false, and when they were genuine the visitation of
them was an idolatrous imitation of heathen practices.
Equally idolatrous was all invoking of saints or proph
ets, including Muhammad himself ; to God alone
should prayer be directed. The clamor raised by
ilaisfativa was tremendous. This was no doctrine of
the schools which he had touched, but a bit of con
crete religiosity which appealed to everyone. His
public life practically ended, and the practices which
he had denounced abide to this day. It is a bitter
satire on his position that when he died in 726 the
populace paid to his relics all these signs of super
stitious reverence against which he had protested.
He became a saint, malgre lui. His work had been
to keep alive the Hanbalite doctrine and pass it on
unchanged to modern times. He did not destroy
philosophy : it was dead of itself before he came.
Nor Sufiism : it is still very much alive. Nor kalam :
it still continues in the form to which it had crystal
lized by his time. But he and his disciples made
possible the Wahhabites and the monotheistic re
vival of our day. The faith of Muhammad himself
was not to perish entirely from the earth.
ASH-SHA RANI 279
It would now be possible to pass at once to the
Wahhabite movement in the latter part of the twelfth
century of the Hijra. All the elements for the ex
planation of it and of the modern situation are in our
hands. But there is one figure which stands out so
clearly in an otherwise most obscure picture and is
so significant for the time, that some account must be
taken of it. It is that of ash-Sha rani, theologian,
canonist, and mystic. He was a Cairene and died in
973. The rule of Egypt had passed half a century
before to the Ottoman Turks, and they governed by
means of a Turkish Pasha. The condition of the
people, as we find it sketched by ash-Sha rani, was a
most unhappy one. They were bent down, and es
pecially the peasantry, under a load of taxation. The
Turks found it advisable, too, to cultivate the friend
ship of the canon lawyers and professional theologi
ans in order to maintain their hold upon the people.
These canonists, in consequence, were rapidly becom
ing an official class with official privileges. Further,
the process, the beginnings of which we have already
seen, by which religious science was narrowed tofiqh,
had gone still further. Practically, the two classes of
theologians left were the canonists and the mystics.
And the mystics had fallen far from their pride of
power under the Mamluks. They now were of the
poor of the land, a kind of Essenes over against the
Pharisees of the schools.
Such, at least, is the picture of his time which ash-
Sha rani gives. How far it is exact must remain un
certain. For, of the many puzzling personalities in
Islam, ash-Sha rani is perhaps for us the most unin-
280 THEOLOGY
telligible. He combined the most abject superstitions
of a superstitious age and country with lofty ethical
indignation ; social humility of the most extreme with
an intellectual pride and arrogance rarely paralleled,
a keen and original grasp of the canon law of the
four schools with an utter submission of the intellect
to the inbreathings of the divine from without ; a
power of discreet silence as to the inconvenient with
an open-mouthed vehemence in other things. He
was a devoted follower of Ibn Arabi and defended his
memory against the accusation of heresy. Yet his
position is singularly different from that of Ibn Arabi,
and a doubt cannot but rise as to either his knowl
edge, his intelligence, or his honesty. Practically
where he differs from the ordinary Muslim is in his
extension of the doctrine of saints. As to the Most
Beautiful Names (al-asma al-husna), he follows Ibn
Hazm. So, too, as to God s qualities, he follows the
older school and would prefer to leave them uncon-
sidered. But he is, otherwise and in general, a sound
Ash arite, e.g., on the doctrine of predestination, and
of man s part in his works (iktisab). There is in him
no sign of the Plotinian pantheism of Ibn Arabi.
The doctrine of God s difference (muWialafa) he
taught, and that He created the world by His will
and not by any emanation of energy.
But truth for him is not to be reached by specula
tion and argument : its only basis is through the un
veiling of the inner eye which brings us to the imme
diate Vision of the Divine. Those who have reached
that Vision, guide and teach those who cannot or
have not. Upon that Vision all systems are built,
THE UNSEEN WORLD 281
and reason can only serve the visionary as a defence
against the gainsayer or against his own too wild
thoughts. Naturally, with such a starting-point as
this the supernatural side of things (al-gliayV) receives
strong emphasis. The Jinn and the angels are most
intense realities. Ash-Sha rani met them in familiar
converse. He met, too, al-Khadir, the undying pil
grim saint who wanders through the lands, succoring
and guiding. The details of these interviews are
given with the greatest exactness. A Jinni in the
form of a dog ran into his house on such a day by
such a door, with a piece of European paper in his
mouth this is a touch of genius on which certain
theological questions were written. The Jinni wished
ash-Sha rani s opinion as to them. Such was the
origin of one of his books, and another sprang from
a similarly exactly described talk with al-Khadir. Yet
he was content also with smaller mercies and reckons
as a Jcarama that he was enabled to read through a
certain book for some time at the rate of two and a
half times daily. To all this it would be possible of
course to say flatly that he lied. But such a judg
ment applied to an oriental is somewhat crude, and
the knot of the mystic s mind in any land is not to be
so easily cut. Further, the doctrine of the ivalis is
developed by him at length. They possess a certain
illumination (ilham), which is, however, different from
the inspiration (ivaliy) of the prophets. So, too, they
never reach the grade of the prophets, or a nearness
to God where the requirements of a revealed law fall
away from them, i.e., they must always walk accord
ing to the law of a prophet. They are all guided by
282 THEOLOGY
God, whatever their particular Kule (tariqa) may be,
but the Kule of al-Junayd (p. 176) is the best because
it is in most essential agreement with the Law
(shared) of Islam. Their karamat are true and are a
consequence of their devout labors, for these are in
agreement with the Qur an and the Sunna. The
order of nature will not be broken for anyone who
has not achieved more than is usual in religious
knowledge and exercises. All walls stand under a
regular hierarchy headed by the Qutb ; yet above
him in holiness stand the Companions of the Prophet.
This marks a very moderate position. Many Sufis
had contended that the walls stood higher than even
the prophets, not to speak of their Companions.
It will be seen that his position is essentially a
mediating one. He wishes to show that the beliefs
of the mystics and of the mutakallims are really one
although they are reached by different paths. In
fiqli he made a similar attempt. The Sufis had al
ways looked down on those theologians who were
canonists pure and simple. A study of canon law
was a necessity, they thought ; but as a propaedeutic
only. The canonists who went no further never
reached religion at all. Especially they held that no
Sufi should join himself to any of the four contend
ing schools. Their controversies were upon insignif
icant details which had nothing to do with the life
in God. But could it not be shown that their dif
ferences were not actual one view being true and
the other false but were capable of being reduced
to a unity ? This was the problem that ash-Sha rani
attacked. These differing opinions, he held, are
THE WAHHABITES 283
adapted to different classes of men. Some men of
greater gifts and endurance can follow the hardest
of these opinions, while the easier are to be recognized
as concessions (rukhsa) from God to the weakness of
others. Each man may follow freely the view which
appeals to him ; God has appointed it for him.
Ash-Sha rani was one of the last original thinkers
in Islam ; for a thinker he was despite his dealings
with the Jinn and al-Khadir. Egypt keeps his
memory. A mosque in Cairo bears his name, as
does also a division of the Badawite darwishes. In
modern times his books have been frequently re
printed, and his influence is one of the ferments in
the new Islam.
We must now pass over about two hundred years
and come to the latter part of the twelfth century of
the Hijra, a period nearly coinciding with the end of
the eighteenth of our era. There these two move
ments come again to light. Wahhabism, the histori
cal origin of which we have already seen (p. 60), is
a branch of the school of Ibn Taymiya. Manuscripts
of the works of Ibn Taymiya copied by the hand
of Ibn Abd al-Wahhab exist in Europe. So the
Wahhabites refused to accept as binding the de
cisions of the four orthodox sects of canon law.
Agreement as a source they also reject. The whole
People of Muhammad can err and has erred. Only
the agreement of the Companions has binding force
for them. |{lt is, therefore, the duty and right of every
jnan to drawhis own dQctrine~irom^the Qur an and
.hft sysfmma of the Schools should
have no weight with him. (|Again, they take the
284 THEOLOGY
anthropomorphisms of the Qur an ip^ their literal
senae.^ God has a hand, God settles Himself on His
throne ; so it must be held " without inquiring how
and without comparison." They profess to be the
only true Muslims, applying to themselves the term
Muwahhids and calling all others Mushriks, assignors
of companions to God. Again, like Ibn Taymiya,
they reject the intercession of ivalis with God. It is
allowable to ask of God for the sake of a saint but
not to pray to the saint. This applies also to Mu
hammad. Pilgrimage to the tombs of saints, the
presenting of offerings there, all acts of reverence,
they also forbid. No regard should be paid even
to the tomb of the Prophet at al-Madina. All
such ceremonies are idolatrous. Whenever possible
the Wahhabites destroy and level the shrines of
saints.
Over other details, such as the prohibition of the
use of tobacco, we need not spend time. Wahhabism
jts_a political force is ffone. It has, however, left the
Sanusi revolt as its direct descendant and what may
be the outcome of that Brotherhood we have no
means of guessing. It has also left a general revival
and reformation throughout the Church of Lalam,
much parallel, as has been remarked, to the counter-
reformation which followed the Protestant Reforma
tion in Europe.
The second movement is the revival of the influence
of al-Ghazzali. That influence never became ab
solutely extinct and it seems to have remained espe
cially strong in al-Yaman. In that corner of the Mus
lim world generations of Sufis lived comparatively
INFLUENCE OF AL-GHAZZALI 285
undisturbed, and it was the Sayyid Murtada, a native
of Zabid in Tihama, who by his great commentary on
the Ihya of al-Ghazzali practically founded the modern
study of that book. There have been two editions
of this commentary in ten quarto volumes and many
of the Ihya itself and of other works by al-Ghazzali.
Whether his readers understand him fully or not,
there can be no question of the wide influence which
he is now exercising. At Mecca, for example, the
orthodox theological teaching is practically Ghaz-
zalian and the controversy throughout all Arabia is
whether Ibn Taymiya and al-Ghazzali can be called
Shaykhs of Islam. The Wahhabites hold that any
one who thus honors al-Ghazzali is an unbeliever, and
the Meccans retort the same of the followers of Ibn
Taymiya.
These two tendencies then that back to the simple
monotheism of Muhammad and that to an agnostic
mysticism are the hopeful signs in modern Islam.
There are many other drifts in which there is no such
hope. Simple materialism under European, mostly
French, influence is one. A seeking of salvation in
the study of canon law is another. Canon law is still
the field to which an enormous proportion of Muslim
theologians turn. Again, there are various forms
of frankly pantheistic mysticism. That is especially
the case among Persians and Turks. For the body
of the people, religion is still overburdened, as in
Ibn Taymiya s days, with a mass of superstition.
Lives of ivalis containing the wildest and most
blasphemous stories abound and are eagerly read.
The books of ash-Sha rani are especially rich in such
286 THEOLOGY
hagiology. It is difficult for us to realize that stories
like the most extravagant in the Thousand and One
Nights are the simplest possibilities to the masses of
Islam. The canon lawyers, still, in their discussions,
take account of the existence of Jinn, and no theo
logian would dare to doubt that Solomon sealed them
up in brass bottles. Of philosophy, in the free and
large sense, there is no trace. Ibn Kushd s reply to
al-Ghazzali s " Destruction of the Philosophers " has
been printed, but only as a pendant to that work.
In it, too, Ibn Rushd carefully covers his great here
sies. His tractates on the study of kalam, spoken of
above, have also been reprinted at Cairo from the
European edition. But these tractates are arranged
to give no clew to his real philosophy. The Arabic
Aristotelianism has perished utterly from the Muslim
lands. Of the modern Indian Mu tazilism no ac
count need be taken here. It is derived from Europe
and is ordinary Christian Unitarianism, connecting
with Muhammad instead of with Jesus.
From the above sketch some necessary conditions
are clear, which must be fulfilled if there is to be a
chance for a future development in Islam. Educa
tion must be widely extended. The proportion of
trained minds must be greatly increased and the bar
rier between them and the commonalty removed.
The economy of teaching has failed ; it has destroyed
the doctrine which it sought to protect. Again, the
slavery of the disciple to the master must cease. It
must always be possible for the student, in defiance
of taqlid, to go back to first principles or to the
primary facts and to disregard what the great Imams
THE PKOBLEM OF THE FUTURE 287
and Mujtahids have taught. So much of health there
was in the Zahirite system.
Third, these primary facts must include the facts
of natural science. The student, emancipated from
the control of the schools, must turn from the study
of himself to an examination of the great world. And
that examination must not be cosmological but bio
logical; it must not lose itself in the infinities but
find itself in concrete realities. It must experiment
and test rather than build lofty hypotheses.
But can the oriental mind thus deny itself? The
English educational experiment in Egypt may go far
to answer that question.
APPENDICES
I. ILLUSTRATIVE DOCUMENTS TRANSLATED FROM THE ARABIC.
II. SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY.
III. CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE.
APPENDIX I
1. ASH-SHAHRASTANI ON THE CLASSIFICATION OF MUSLIM SECTS.
2. TWO TllADITIONS FROM MUHAMMAD ON THE ESSENTIALS OF
ISLAM.
3. A SHORT CREED BY AL-ASH ARI.
4. A SHORT CREED BY AL-GHAZZALI.
5. A SHORT CREED BY AN-NASAFI (MATARIDITE).
6. A SCHOLASTIC EXPOSITION OF THE FUNDAMENTALS OF THE-
OLOGY.
7. ANALYSIS OF A TREATISE IN CANON LAW.
Notes have been added where such appeared called for, bnt the
index, facilitating reference to the body of the book, renders a
full commentary unnecessary. The student should use the index
as a vocabulary of technical terms, referring for their explanation
to the passages where they occur.
ASH-SHAHRASTANI ON THE CLASSIFICATION OF MUSLIM SECTS
Then I applied myself to what of arrangement was easy of
attainment and to what of attainment was easy of arrangement,
until I had crowded them [the different opinions] into four
fundamentals, which are the great principles. The first
fundamental concerns the Qualities (sifat) with the Unity
(tawhid] ; it embraces the question of the eternal (azali) Qual
ities, affirmed by some and denied by others, and of the ex
position of the essential Qualities (sifat adh-dliat] and of the
active Qualities (sifat al-fi l) and of what is necessary in God
Most High and what is possible for Him and what is impos
sible ; it involves the controversies between the Ash arites and
the Karramites and the Anthropomorphists (mujassims) and
the Mu tazilites. The second fundamental concerns decree
(qadar) and justice (adl) ; it embraces the question of destiny
(qada) and decree (qadar} ; of force (jabr) and acquisition
291
292 APPENDIX I
(kasb) ; of the willing of good and of evil and of the decreed
and the known, affirmed by some and denied by others ; it
involves the controversies between the Qadarites and Najjarites
and Jabarites and Ash arites and Karramites. , The third
fundamental concerns promise (wa d) a*nd the decisions (hu-
kms) ; it embraces the question of faith (iman) and repentance
(tawba) and threatening \wa id) and postponing (irja) and
pronouncing anyone an unbeliever (takfir} and leading anyone
astray (tadlil), affirmed by some and denied by others ; it
involves the controversies between the Murji ites and the
Wa idites and the Mu tazilites and the Ash arites and the
Karramites. The fourth fundamental concerns tradition
(sam) and reason (aql) and the prophetic mission (risald)
and the imamate ; it embraces the questions of the determi
nation of actions as good (tahsin] or vile (taqbih) ; of the ad
vantageous (salah) and most advantageous (aslah) ; of be
nignity (lutf) ; of the prophets being guarded* against sin
(isma) ; of the condition of the imamate, by statute (nass)
according to some and by agreement (ijma) according to
others, and how it is transferred on the view of those who say
it is by statute, and how it is fixed on the view of those who
say it is by agreement ; it involves the controversies between
the Shi ites and the Kharijites and the Mu tazilites and the
Karramites and the Ash arites. Translated from Cureton s
Arabic text, p. 4.
II
THE PROPHET IN A TRADITION
"Islam is built upon five things; testimony that there is
no god but God and that Muhammad is the Apostle of God.
Prayer (salat), the Poor-rate (zakat), Pilgrimage (hajj) and
Fast (sawm) in Ramadan."
A TRADITION OF THE PROPHET
Jibril came in the form of an Arab of the desert and sat
down so that his knees touched the knees of the Prophet and
said, "O Apostle of God, what is Islam?" He said, "That
thou should bear witness that there is no god save God and
MUHAMMAD; AL-ASH ARI 293
that I am the Apostle of God ; that thou shouldest perform
the prayers (salat] and bring the poor-rate (zakat) and fast in
the month of Kamadan and pilgrimage to the House if the
way is possible for thee." He said, " Thou hast spoken truly."
Then he said, "What is Faith (iman)?" The Prophet said,
"That thou should believe in God and His angels and His
books and His messengers and in the Last Day, and that thou
should believe in the decreeing (qadar} both of good and
of evil." He said, " Thou hast spoken truly." Then he said,
"What is right doing (ihsari)?" The Prophet said, "That
thou should serve God as though thou sawest Him ; for
though thou seest Him not, He sees thee." He said, " Thou
hast spoken truly." Then he said, " When shall be the Last
Day (as-sa a)?" The Prophet said, "The questioned know-
eth not more of that than the questioner." Then he arose and
went out. And the Prophet said, " That was Jibril ; he came
to you to teach you your religion (din)." Translated from
Cureton s text of ash-Shahrastani, p. 27.
in
A SHORT CEEED BY AL-ASH ARI
Our doctrine which we teach and our religion (diyana) which we follow
consists in clinging fast to the Book of God and the Usage (sunna) of
His Prophet and to that which is handed down from the Companions,
their immediate followers (tabi s) and from the leaders (imams) in
tradition with that we take refuge; and we teach that which
Ahmad ibn Hanbal may God illumine his face, exalt his rank and
make great his reward followed; and we shun that which is op
posed to his doctrine. For he is the excellent leader, the perfect
chief, through whom God made plain the truth, when error was made
manifest, and showed the path and smote down the innovations of
the innovators, the deviations of the deviators and the doubts of the
doubters. So, the mercy of God be upon him for an appointed
leader and an instructed chief, and upon all the. leaders of the Mus
lims.
The sum of our doctrine is this, that we believe in God, His
Angels, His Books, His Apostles, in all that has come from
God, and what trustworthy men (tkiqat) have reported from
294 APPENDIX I
the Apostles of God ; we oppose nothing thereof. That God
is One God, Single, One, Eternal ; beside Him no God exists ;
He has taken to Himself no wife (sahiba), nor child (wnlad) ,
and that Muhammad is His Servant (abd) and His Apostle.
That Paradise and Hell are Verity and that the Hour (as-sa a)
will come without doubt, and God will arouse those that are
in the graves. That God has settled Himself (istawd) upon
His throne, as He has said, (Qur. 20, 4); "the Kahman has
settled Himself upon His throne." That God has a counte
nance, as He has said, (Qur. 55, 27) ; " and the countenance of
thy. Lord will abide, full of majesty and glory ; " and two
hands, as He has said, (Qur. 5, 69); "much more! both His
hands are spread out," and (Qur. 38, 75); " that which I have
created with both My hands ; " and two eyes, without asking
how (bila kayfd), as He has said, (Qur. 54, 14) ; " which swims
forth under Our eyes." That whoever thinks that God s name
is other than He, is in error. That God has Knowledge (Urn},
as He has said, (Qur. 35, 12); "Not one woman becomes
pregnant and brings forth, except by His knowledge." We
maintain that God has Power (qudrd), as He has said, (Qur.
41, 14) ; "and have they not seen that God who created them
is stronger than they ? " We maintain that God has Hearing
(sarrf) and Seeing (basar] and do not deny it, as do the Mu*-
tazilites, Jahmites and Kharijites. We teach that God s Word
(kalam) is uncreated, and that He has never created anything
except by saying to it, " Be ! " and it forthwith became, as He
has said, (Qur. 16, 42) ; " Our speech to anything when We
willed it was, Be and it was." Nothing exists upon earth,
be it good or bad, but that which God wills ; but all things
are by God s Will (mashyd). No one is able to do anything
before God does it, neither is anyone independent of God,
nor can he withdraw himself from God s Knowledge. There
is no Creator but God. The works (amals) of creatures are
created and predestined by God, as He said, (Qur. 37, 94) ;
" and God has created you and what ye do." Man is able to
create nothing ; but they are created, as He has said, (Qur.
35, 31) ; " Is there any Creator except God?" and (Qur. 16, 17)
AL-ASH ARI 295
"and is He who created like him who created not? "and
(Qur. 52, 35) ; " were they created out of nothing, or are they
the creators ? " and such passages are many in the Qur an.
And God maintains the believers in obedience to Him, is
gracious unto them, cares for them, reforms them, and guides
them aright; but the unbelievers He leads astray, guides
them not aright, vouchsafes them not Faith (iman), by His
Grace, as the People of error and pride maintain. For should
He be gracious unto them and help them aright, then would
they be pious, and should He guide them aright, then would
they allow themselves to be guided aright, as He has said,
(Qur. 7, 177) ; "whom God guideth aright, he allows himself
to be guided aright, and whom He leads astray, they are the
losers." God is able to help the unbelieving aright and to
be gracious unto them, so that they shall become believing,
but He wills that they shall be unbelieving as is known. For
He has made them impervious to all help and sealed their
hearts. Good and Evil happen according to the Destiny (qada)
and Decree (qadar) of God for good and evil, for the sweet
and the bitter. We know that the misfortune that befalls us
is not in order that we may go astray, and that the good fort
une which befalls us is not in order that we may go aright.
We have no control over that which is good or hurtful to us,
except so far as God wills. We flee from our anxieties to God
and commit at all times our distress and poverty to Him. We
teach that the Qur an is God s Word, and that it is uncreated,
and that whosoever says that it is created is an unbeliever
(kafir). We believe that God at the Day of Resurrection
(yawm al-qiyamd) will be visible to the eyes, as the moon is
seen upon the night of the full moon ; the believers will see
Him, according to traditions which have come down from the
Prophet. We teach that while the believers will see Him,
the unbelievers will be separated from Him by a wall of divis
ion, as God has said, (Qur. 83, 15) ; "Surely not! They will
be separated from their Lord, upon that Day." We teach that
Moses besought God that he might see Him in fchis world ;
then God revealed Himself to the mountain and turned it into
296 APPENDIX I
dust and taught Moses thereby that he could not see Him in
this world (Qur. 7, 139). We are of the opinion that we may
not accuse anyone of unbelief (kufr), who prays towards Mec
ca, on account of sin committed by him, such as unchastity,
theft, wine drinking, as the Kharijites believe, who judge that
these thereby become unbelievers. We teach that whoever
commits a great sin (kabira), or anything like it, holding it
to be allowed, is an unbeliever, since he does not believe in
its prohibition. We teach that Islam is a wider idea than
Faith (iman), so that not every Islam is Faith. We believe
that God turns the hearts upside down, and holds them
between two of His fingers, that He lays the heavens upon a
finger and the earth upon a finger, according to the tradition
from the Prophet. We believe that God will not leave in
Hell any of those who confess His Unity (muwdhhid) and hold
fast to the Faith, and that there is no Hell for him whom the
Prophet has by his witness appointed to Paradise. We hope
for Paradise for sinners and fear on their account, that they
will be punished in Hell. We teach that God will release a
few out of Hell, on account of Muhammad s intercession
(shafa d) after they have been scorched there. We believe in
the punishment of the grave. We believe that the Tank
(hawd) and the Balance are Verities : that the Bridge as-Sirat
is a Verity ; that the Arousing (ba th) after death is a Verity ;
that God will set up His creatures in a place (mawqif) and will
hold a reckoning with the Believers. * We believe that Faith
(iman) consists in word (qawl) and in work (amal) and that
it increases and diminishes. We trust in the sound Tra
ditions handed down from the Apostle of God, which trust
worthy people (thiqat), just man from just man, up to the
Apostle, have transmitted. We hold by the love of the early
* For Muslim eschatology reference may still be made to Sale s
introduction to the Qur an, 4. The punishment of the grave is
what, in the case of unbelievers, follows the inquisition by the two
angels Munkar and Nakir; see on them Lane s Modern Egyptians^
chap, xxviii; on the whole subject, see translations by Gautier and
Wolff and tractate by Ruling (Bibliography, p. 367).
AL-ASH ARI 297
Believers (salaf), whom God chose to be Companions to the
Prophet, and we praise them with the praise with which God
praised them, and we carry on their succession. We assert
that the Imam succeeding the Apostle of God was Abu Bakr ;
that God through him made the Religion (din) mighty, and
caused him to conquer the Apostates (murtadds) . The Mus
lims made him their Imam, just as Muhammad had made him
Imam at prayers. Then followed [as legal Imam] Umar ibn
al-Khattab ; then Uthman ibn Affan ; his murderers killed
him out of wickedness and enmity ; then Ali ibn Abi Talib.
These are the Imams after the Apostle, and their Khalifate is
that of the Prophetic office [i.e., they are, though not prophets,
successors of the Prophet]. We bear witness of Paradise for
the Ten (al-asliaratu-l-mubashshara}, to whom the Apostle
bore witness of it, and we carry on the succession of the other
Companions of the Prophet and hold ourselves far from that
which was in dispute between them. We hold that the four
Imams were in the true way, were rightly guided and excel
lent, so that no one equals them in excellence. We hold as
true the traditions which the People of Tradition (naql) have
established, concerning the descent of God to the lowest
heaven (sama ad-dunya], and that the Lord will say, " Is
there a supplicant ? Is there a seeker for forgiveness ? " and
the rest of that which they have handed down and established,
contrary to that which the mistaken and misled opine. We
ground ourselves in our opposition on the Qur an, the Sunna
of the Prophet, the agreement of the Muslims and what is in
accordance therewith, but put forth no novelty (bid a) not
sanctioned by God, and opine of God nothing that we have
not been taught. We teach that God will come on the Day
of Resurrection, as He has said, (Qur. 89, 23) ; " When the
earth shall be turned to dust, and the Lord shall appear and
the angels, rank on rank," and that God is near to His ser
vants, in what way (Tcayfa) He wills, as He has said, (Qur. 50,
15) ; " and We are nearer to him than the artery in his neck ; "
and (Qur. 53, 8) ; " Then He approached and came near and
was two bows length distant or even nearer." To our Relig-
298 APPENDIX I
ion (din) belongs further, that we on Fridays and on festival
days pray behind every person, pious and profane so are the
conditions for congregational prayers, as it is handed down
from Abd Allah ibn Umar that he prayed behind al-Hajjaj.
To our Beligion belongs the wiping (mash) of the inner boots
(khuffs) upon a journey and at home, in contradiction to the
deniers of this.* "We uphold the prayer for peace for the
Imams of the Muslims, submission to their office, and main
tain the error of those who hold it right to rise against them
whenever there may be apparent in them a falling away from
right. We are against armed rebellion against them and civil
war.
We believe in the appearance of anti-Christ (ad-Dajjal) ac
cording to the tradition handed down from the Prophet ; in
the punishment of the grave, and in Munkar and Nakir and in
their questions to the buried in their graves. We hold the
tradition of the journey to heaven (mi raj, Qur. 17) of Mu
hammad as true, and declare many of the visions in sleep to
be true, and we say that there is an explanation for them.
We uphold the alms for the dead of the Muslims and prayer
for them, and believe that God will help them therewith. We
hold as true that there are enchanters in, the world, and that
enchantment is and exists. We hold as a religious duty the
prayer which is held over the dead of those who have prayed
toward Mecca, whether they have been believers or godless ;
we uphold also their right of testation. We acknowledge
that Paradise and Hell are created, and that whoever dies or
is killed, dies or is killed at his appointed time (ajal) ; that
the articles of sustenance (rizq) from God, with which He
sustains His creatures, are permitted (halal) and forbidden
(haram) ; f that Satan makes evil suggestions to men, and puts
* This, one of the dividing questions between Sunnites and Shi-
4tes, belongs to theology as well as law. See p. 314 and Goldziher,
Zur LUeraturgeschichte der &lt;SV a, p. 87.
| The Mu tazilites held that articles of sustenance of a forbidden
nature, such as pork or wine, could not be called rtzqin this tech
nical sense ; that God could not so use them. The orthodox re-
AL-ASH ABI 299
them in doubt, and causes them to be possessed, contrary to
that which the Mu tazilites and the Jahmites maintain, as God
said, (Qur. 2, 276) ; "Those who take usury will [at the Resur-
rection] stand there like one whom Satan causes to be pos
sessed by madness," and (Qur. 114, 4 ff.) ; "I take my refuge
in God, from the evil suggestion, from the stealthy one who
makes suggestions in the hearts of men, by means of men and
Jinn." We affirm that God may distinguish the pious by
signs which He manifests through them. Our teaching con
cerning the little children of the polytheists (mushriqs) is this,
that God will kindle a fire in the other world for them, and
will say, "Run in there ; " as the tradition says.* We be
lieve that God knows what men do and what they will to do,
what happens and how that which does not happen, if it
should happen, would happen. We believe in the obedience
of the Imams and in their counsel of the Muslims. We con
sider right the separation from every inciter to innovation
(bid d) and the turning aside from the People of wandering
desires (ahl al-ahwd) . Translated from the Arabic text in Spitta s
Zur Geschichte al-As ari s, pp. 133 ff.
torted that a man might live his life out on forbidden things ; had
he then been independent of God as to his sustenance ? The
Mu tazilites defined rizq as " a possession which its possessor eats "
and as " that from which one is not hindered from profiting " ; the
orthodox, as a name for that which God sends to man and the other
animals and they eat it and profit by it.
* Some will run into the fire and find themselves immediately in
Paradise ; these would have been believers. Others will refuse,
and will be treated as their parents.
300 APPENDIX I
IV
A SHOBT CREED BY AL-GHAZZALI
An exposition of the Creed of the People of the Sunna on the two Words
of Witnessing (kalimata^^sh-shahada) which form one of the
Foundations of Islam.
[Intended to be committed to memory by children. It forms the
first section of the second book of his Ihya, vol. ii, pp. 17-42 of
edit, of Cairo with commentary of the Sayyid Murtada.]
We say and in God is our trust Praise belongeth unto
God, the Beginner, the Bringer back, the Doer of what He
willeth, the Lord of the Glorious Throne and of Mighty Grasp,
the Guider of His chosen creatures to the right path and to the
true way, the Granter of benefits to them after the witness to
the Unity (tawhid) by guarding their articles of belief from
obscurities of doubt and opposition, He that bringeth them to
follow His Apostle, the Chosen one (al-Mustafa), and to imi
tate the traces of his Companions, the most honored, through
His aid and right guidance revealed to them in His essence
and His works by His beautiful qualities which none perceives,
save he who inclines his ear. He is the witness who maketh
known to them that He in His essence is One without any
partner (sharik). Single without any similar, Eternal without
any opposite, Separate without any like. He is One, Prior
(qadim) with nothing before Him, from eternity (azali) with
out any beginning, abiding in existence with none after Him,
to eternity (abadi) without any end, subsisting without ending,
abiding without termination. He hath not ceased and He
will not cease to be described with glorious epithets ; finish
ing and ending, through the cutting off of the ages and the
terminating of allotted times, have no rule over Him, but He
is the First and Last, the External and the Internal, and He
knoweth everything.
We witness that He is not a body possessing form, nor a
substance possessing bounds and limits : He does not resemble
AL-GHAZZALI 301
bodies, either in limitation or in accepting division. He is
not a substance and substances do not exist in Him ; and He
is not an accident and accidents do not exist in Him, nay He
does not resemble an entity, and no entity resembles Him ;
nothing is like Him and He is not like anything ; measure
does not bound Him and boundaries do not contain Him ; the
directions do not surround Him and neither the earth nor the
heavens are on different sides of Him. Lo, He is seated firmly
upon His Throne (arsh), after the manner which He has said,
and in the sense in which He willed a being seated firmly
(istiwa), which is far removed from contact and fixity of loca
tion and being established and being enveloped and being re
moved. The Throne does not carry Him, but the Throne and
those that carry it are carried by the grace of His power and
mastered by His grasp. He is above the Throne and the
Heavens and above everything unto the limit of the Pleiades,
with an aboveness which does not bring Him nearer to the
Throne and the Heavens, just as it does not make Him further
from the earth and the Pleiades. Nay, He is exalted by de
grees from the Throne and the Heavens, just as He is exalted
by degrees from the earth and the Pleiades ; and He, in spite
of that, is near to every entity and is "nearer to a creature
than the artery of his neck " (Qur. 50, 15), and He witnesseth
everything, since His nearness does not resemble the nearness
of bodies, just as His essence does not resemble the essence
of bodies. He does not exist in anything, just as nothing ex
ists in Him : He has exalted Himself far therefrom that a
place should contain Him, just as He has sanctified Himself
far therefrom that time should limit Him. Nay, He was be
fore He had created Time and Place and He is now above that
which He was above, and distinct from His creatures through
His qualities. There is not in His essence His equal, nor in
His equal His essence. He is far removed from change of
state or of place. Events have no place in Him, and mishaps
do not befall him. Nay, He does not cease, through His
glorious epithets, to be far removed from changing, and
through His perfect qualities to be independent of perfecting
302 APPENDIX I
increase. The existence of His essence is known by reason ;
His essence is seen with the eyes, a benefit from Him and a
grace to the pious, in the Abiding Abode and a completion in
beatitude from Him, through gazing upon His gracious face.
We witness that He is living, powerful, commanding, con
quering ; inadequacy and weakness befall Him not ; slumber
seizes Him not, nor sleep. Passing away does not happen to
Him, nor death. He is Lord of the Worlds, the Visible and
the Invisible, that of Force and that of Might ; He possesses
Rule and Conquest and Creation and Command ; the heavens
are rolled in His right hand and the created things are over
come in His grasp ; He is separate in creating and inventing ;
He is one in bringing into existence and innovating ; He
created the creation and their works and decreed their sus
tenance and their terms of life ; not a decreed thing escapes
His grasp and the mutations of things are not distant from
His power ; the things which He hath decreed cannot be
reckoned and the things which He knoweth have no end.
We witness that He knoweth all the tilings that can be
known, comprehending that which happen eth from the bounds
of the earths unto the topmost heavens ; no grain in the earth
or the heavens is distant from His knowledge. Yea, He
knows the creeping of the black ant upon the rugged rock in
a dark night, and He perceives the movement of the mote in
the midst of the air ; He knows the secret and the concealed
and has knowledge of the suggestions of the minds and the
movements of the thoughts and the concealed things of the
inmost parts, by a knowledge which is prior from eternity ; He
has not ceased to be describable by it, from the ages of the
ages, not by a knowledge which renews itself and arises in
His essence by arrival and removal.
We witness that He is a Wilier of the things that are, a
Director of the things that happen ; there does not come
about in the world, seen or unseen, little or much, small or
great, good or evil, advantage or disadvantage, faith or un
belief, knowledge or ignorance, success or loss, increase or
diminution, obedience or rebellion, except by His will. What
AL-GHAZZALI 303
He wills is, and what He wills not is not. Not a glance of one
who looks, or a slip of one who thinks is outside of His will :
He is the Creator, the Bringer back, the Doer of that which
He wills. There is no opponent of His command and no re
peater of His destiny and no refuge for a creature from dis
obeying Him, except by His help and His mercy, and no
strength to a creature to obey Him except by His wilL Even
though mankind and the Jinn and the Angels and the Shaytans
were to unite to remove a single grain in the world or to bring
it to rest without His will, they would be too weak for that.
His will subsists in His essence as one of His qualities ; He
hath not ceased to be described through it as a Wilier, in His
infinity, of the existence of things at their appointed times
which He hath decreed. So they come into existence at their
appointed times even as He has willed in His infinity without
precedence or sequence. They happen according to the agree
ment of His knowledge and His will, without exchange or
change in planning of things, nor with arranging of thoughts
or awaiting of time, and therefore one thing does not distract
Him from another.
And we witness that He is a Hearer and a Seer. He hears
and sees, and no audible thing is distant from His hearing, and
no visible thing is far from His seeing, however fine it may
be. Distance does not curtain off His hearing and darkness
does not dull His seeing ; He sees without eyeball or eyelid,
and hears without earholes or ears, just as He knows without a
brain and seizes without a limb and creates without an instru
ment, since His qualities do not resemble the qualities of
created things, just as His essence does not resemble the es
sences of created things.
And we witness that He speaks, commanding, forbidding,
praising, threatening, with a speech from all eternity, prior,
subsisting in His essence not resembling the speech of created
things. It is not a sound which originates through the slip
ping out of air, or striking of bodies ; nor is it a letter which
is separated off by closing down a lip or moving a tongue.
And the Qur an and the Tawrat [the Law of Moses] and the
304 APPENDIX I
Injil [the Gospel] and the Zabbur [the Psalms] are His book
revealed to His Apostles. And the Qur an is repeated by
tongues, written in copies, preserved in hearts : yet it, in spite
of that, is prior, subsisting in the essence of God, not subject
to division and separation through being transferred to hearts
and leaves. And Musa heard the speech of God without a
sound and without a letter, just as the pious see the essence of
God, in the other world, without a substance or an attribute.
And since He has those qualities, He is Living, Knowing,
Powerful, a Wilier, a Hearer, a Seer, a Speaker, through Life,
Power, Knowledge, Will, Hearing, Seeing, Speech, not by a
thing separated from His essence.
We witness that there is no entity besides Him, except what
is originated from His action and proceeds from His justice,
after the most beautiful and perfect and complete and just of
ways. He is wise in His actions, just in His determinations;
there is no analogy between His justice and the justice of
creatures, since tyranny is conceivable in the case of a creature,
when he deals with the property of some other than himself,
but tyranny is not conceivable in the case of God. For He
never encounters any property in another besides Himself, so
that His dealing with it might be tyranny. Everything besides
Him, consisting of men and Jinn and Angels and Shay tans
and the heavens and the earth and animals and plants and
inanimate things and substance and attribute and things per
ceived and things felt, is an originated thing, which He
created by His power, before any other had created it, after
it had not existed, and which He invented after that it had
not been a thing, since He in eternity was an entity by Him
self, and there was not along with Him any other than He.
So He originated the creation thereafter, by way of manifesta
tion of His power, and verification of that which had preceded
of His Will, and of that which existed in eternity of His
Word ; not because He had any lack of it or need of it. And
He is gracious in creating and in making for the first times
and in imposing of duty not of necessity and He is gener
ous in benefiting ; and well-doing and gracious helping be-
AL-GHAZZALI 305
long to Him, since He is able to bring upon His creatures
different kinds of punishment and to test them with different
varieties of pains and ailments. And if He did that, it would
be justice on His part, and would not be a vile action or
tyranny in Him. He rewardeth His believing creatures for
their acts of obedience by a decision which is of generosity
and of promise and not of right and of obligation, since no
particular action toward anyone is incumbent upon Him, and
tyranny is inconceivable in Him, and no one possesses a right
against Him. And His right to acts of obedience is binding
upon the creatures because He has made it binding through
the tongues of His prophets, not by reason alone. But He
sent apostles and manifested their truth by plain miracles,
and they brought His commands and forbiddings and promis-
ings and threatenings. So, belief in them as to what they
have brought is incumbent upon the creation.
THE SECOND WORD OF WITNESSING is witnessing that the
apostolate belongs to the apostle, and that God sent the un
lettered Qurayshite prophet, Muhammad, with his apostolate
to the totality of Arabs and foreigners and Jinn and men.
And He abrogated by his law the other laws, except so much
of them as He confirmed ; and made him excellent over the
rest of the prophets and made him the Lord of Mankind and
declared incomplete the Faith that consists in witnessing the
Unity, which is saying, "There is no god except God," so
long as there is not joined to that a witnessing to the Apostle,
which is saying, " Muhammad is the Apostle of God." And
He made obligatory upon the creation belief in him, as to all
which he narrated concerning the things of this world and the
next. And that He would not accept the faith of a creature,
so long as he did not believe in that which the Prophet nar
rated concerning things after death. The first of that is the
question of Munkar and Nakir ; these are two awful and ter
rible beings who will cause the creature to sit up in his grave,
complete, both soul and body ; and they will ask him, "Who
is thy Lord, and what is thy religion (din], and who is thy
Prophet ? " They are the two testers in the grave and their
306 APPENDIX I
questioning is the first testing after death. And that he
should believe in the punishment of the grave that it is a
Verity and that its judgment upon the body and the soul is
just, according to what God wills. And that he should be
lieve in the Balance it with the two scales and the tongue,
the magnitude of which is like unto the stages of the heavens
and the earth. In it, deeds are weighed by the power of God
Most High ; and its weights in that day will be of the weight
of motes and mustard seeds, to show the exactitude of its jus
tice. The leaves of the good deeds will be placed in a beauti
ful form in the scale of light ; and then the Balance will be
weighed down by them according to the measure of their de
gree with God, by the grace of God. And the leaves of evil
deeds will be cast in a vile form into the scale of darkness,
and the Balance will be light with them, through the justice
of God. And that he should believe that the Bridge (as-sirat)
is a Verity ; it is a bridge stretched over the back of Hell
(jdhannam), sharper than a sword and finer than a hair. The
feet of the unbelievers slip upon it, by the decree of God,
and fall with them into the Fire. But the feet of believers
stand firm upon it, by the grace of God, and so they pass into
the Abiding Abode. And that he should believe in the Tank
(hawd), to which the people shall go down, the Tank of Muh-
hammad from which the believers shall drink before entering
the Garden and after passing the Bridge. Whoever drinks
of it a single draught will never thirst again thereafter. Its
breadth is a journey of a month ; its water is whiter than milk
and sweeter than honey ; around it are ewers in numbers like
the stars of heaven ; into it flow two canals from al-Kawthar
(Qur. 108). And that he should believe in the Eeckoning
and in the distinctions between men in it, him with whom it
will go hard in the Eeckoning and him to whom compas
sion will be shown therein, and him who enters the Garden
without any reckoning, these are the honored (muqarrdb).
God Most High will ask whomsoever He will of the prophets,
concerning the carrying of His message, and whomsoever He
will of the unbelievers, concerning the rejection of the mes-
AL-GHAZZALI 307
sengers; and He will ask the innovators (mubtadi s) concern
ing the Sunna; and the Muslims concerning works. And
that he should believe that the attestors of God s Unity
(muwahhids) will be brought forth from the Fire, after ven
geance has been taken on them, so that there will not remain
in Hell an attestor of God s Unity. And that he should be
lieve in the intercession (shafa a) of the prophets, next of the
learned (ulama), next of the martyrs, next of the rest of the
believers each according to his dignity and rank with God
Most High. And he who remains of the believers, and has no
intercessor, shall be brought forth of the grace of God, whose
are Might and Majesty. So there shall not abide eternally in
the Fire a single believer, but whoever has in his heart the
weight of a single grain of faith shall be brought forth there
from. And that he should confess the excellence of the Com
panions May God be well pleased with them! and their
rank ; and that the most excellent of mankind, after the
Prophet, is Abu Bakr, next Umar, next Uthman, next Ali
May God be well pleased with them ! And that he should
think well of all the Companions and should praise them like
as he praises God, whose are Might and Majesty, and His
Apostles. All this is of that which has been handed down in
traditions from the Prophet and in narratives from the follow
ers. He who confesses all this, relying upon it, is of the
People of the Truth and the Company of the Sunna, and hath
separated himself from the band of error and the sect of
innovation (bid a). So we ask from God perfection of cer
tainty and firm standing in the Faith (din) for us and for all
Muslims through His compassion. lo ! He is the Most Com
passionate ! and may the blessing of God be upon our Lord
Muhammad and upon every chosen creature.
308 APPENDIX I
ARTICLES OF BELIEF OF NAJM AD-DIN ABU HAFS AN-NASAFI
[A Mataridite who d. A.H. 537. This creed is still used as a
text-book in schools. It is translated from Cureton s edition (Lon
don, 1843) with the assistance of at-Taftazani s commentary (Con
stantinople, A.H. 1310). The asterisks mark the points on which
al-Mataridi differed from al-Ash ari.]
In the name of God, the merciful Compassionator.
The Shaykh, the Imam, Najm ad-Din Abu Hafs Umar ibn
Muhammad ibn Ahmad an-Nasafi may God have mercy upon
him ! said ; The People of Verity, contradicting the Scep
tics \Sufistiqiya, i.e., Sophists] say that the real natures of
things are validly established and that the science of them is
certain.
Further, that the sources of knowledge for mankind are
three: the sound Senses, true Narration (khabar), and Reason
(aql}. As for the Senses, they are five : Hearing, Sight,
Smell, Taste and Touch, and by each sense you are informed
concerning that for which it is appointed. True Narration,
again, is of two kinds. The one is Narration handed down
along a large number of lines of tradition (mutawatir); that
is, it is established by the tongues of a number of people of
whom we cannot imagine that they would agree in a lie. It
compels a knowledge which is of necessity (daruri), such as
the knowledge of departed kings in past times and of distant
countries. And the second is Narration by the Apostle (rasut)
aided by miracle [i.e., Muhammad], and it compels deduced
knowledge (istidlali), and the knowledge established by it
resembles in certainty and fixity the knowledge established
by necessity.
Then as for Reason, it is a cause of knowledge also ; and
whatever is established by intuition (badaha) is of necessity,
as the knowledge that everything is greater than its parts ;
and whatever is established by inference is acquired knowl
edge (iktisabi), as the existence of fire from the appearance of
AN-NASAFI 309
smoke. And the Inner Light (ilham) with the People of Ver
ity is not one of the causes of knowledge as to the soundness
of anything.f
Further, the world in the totality of its parts is a thing
originated (muhdatk), in that it consists of Substances (ayns),
and Attributes (arads). The Substances are what exist iu
themselves, and a substance is either a compound, that is a
body (jism), or not compounded like an essence (jawhar),
namely a division that is not further divided. And the attri
butes are what do not exist in themselves but have a depend
ent existence in bodies or essences, such as colors, tastes,
conditions (kawns), odors.
The Originator (Muhdith} of the world is God Most High,
the One, the Eternal, the Decreeing, the Knowing, the Hear
ing, the Seeing, the Willing. He is not an attribute, nor a
body, nor an essence, nor a thing formed, nor a thing bounded,
nor a thing numbered, nor a thing divided, nor a thing com
pounded, nor a thing limited; and He is not described by
quiddity (mahiya), nor by modality (kayfiya), and He does
not exist in place or time, and there is nothing that resembles
Him and nothing that is outwith His knowledge and power.
He has qualities (sifat] from all eternity (azali) existing in
His essence. They are not He nor are they any other than
He. They are Knowledge and Power and Life and Strength
and Hearing and Seeing and Doing and Creating and Sustain
ing and Speech (kalam).
And He, whose Majesty is majestic, speaks with a Word
(kalam). This Word is a quality from all eternity, not belong
ing to the genus of letters and sounds, a quality that is incom
patible with coming to silence and that has no weakness.
God Most High speaks with this Word, commanding and
f This is not the normal doctrine of Islam and the commentators
have to explain this passage away. Consult in the chapters on the
ology, the whole Sufi development and especially the views of al-
Ghazzali. Al-Mataridi was greatly influenced by Abu Hanifa, who
was hostile to mystics. Notice, too, the philosophical basis and
beginning of this creed.
310 APPENDIX I
prohibiting and narrating. And the Qur an is the uncreated
Word of God, repeated by our tongues, heard by our ears,
written in our copies, preserved in our hearts, yet not simply
a transient state (hal) in these [i.e., the tongues, ears, etc.].
And Creating (takwin) is a quality of God Most High from all
eternity, and it is the Creating of the world and of every one
of its parts at the time of its becoming existent, and this
quality of Creating is not the thing created, according to our
opinion.* And Willing is a quality of God Most High from
all eternity, existing in His essence.
And that there is a Vision (ruyd) of God Most High is
allowed by reason and certified by tradition (naql). A proof
on authority has come down with the affirmation that believ
ers have a Vision of God Most High in Paradise and that He
is seen, not in a place or in a direction or by facing or the
joining of glances or the placing of a distance between him
who sees and God Most High.
And God Most High is the Creator of all actions of His
creatures, whether of unbelief or belief, of obedience or of
rebellion ; all of them are by the will of God and His sen
tence and His conclusion and His decreeing.
And to His creatures belong actions of choice (ikhtiyar),*
for which they are rewarded or punished, and the good in
these is by the good pleasure of God (ridd) and the vile in
them is not by His good pleasure.*
And the ability to do the action (istita a) goes along with
the action and is the essence of the power (qudra) by which
the action takes place, and this word " ability " means the
soundness of the causes and instruments and limbs. And the
validity of the imposition of the task (taklif] is based upon
this ability,* and the creature has not a task imposed upon
him that is not in his power.
And the pain which is found in one who is beaten as a con
sequence of being beaten by any man, and the state of being
broken in glass as a consequence of its being broken by any
man, and such things, all that is created by God Most High,
and the creature has no part in its creation and a slain man is
AN-NASAFI 311
dead because his appointed time (ajal) has come ; and death
exists in a slain man and is created by God Most High, and
the appointed time is one.f
And that which is forbidden (haram) is still Sustenance
(rizq), and each one receives his own Sustenance whether it
consists of permitted or of forbidden things ; and let no one
imagine that a man shall not eat his Sustenance or that an
other than he shall eat his Sustenance.
And God leadeth astray whom He wills and guideth aright
whom He wills, and it is not incumbent upon God Most High
to do that which may be best (aslah) for the creature.
The punishment of the grave for unbelievers and for some
rebellious ones of the believers, and the bliss of the obedient
in the grave, and the questioning by Munkar and Nakir are
established by proofs of authority. And the Quickening of
the Dead (ba th) is a Verity, and the Weighing is a Verity, and
the Book is a Verity and the Tank (hawd) is a Verity, and
the Bridge, as-Sirat, is a Verity, and the Garden is a Verity,
and the Fire is a Verity, and they are both created, existing,
continuing ; they shall not pass away and their people shall
not pass away.
A great sin (kdbira) does not exclude the creature who be
lieves from the Belief (iman) and does not make him an unbe
liever. And God does not forgive him who joins another with
Himself, but He forgives anything beneath that to whom He
wills, of sins small (saghira) or great.
And there may be punishment for a small and pardon for a
great one, if it be not of the nature of considering lawful what
is forbidden, for that is unbelief (kufr). And the intercession
(shafa a) of the Apostles and of the excellent on behalf of
those who commit great sins is established.
f A sect of the Mu tazilites held that a man could have two ajals,
one his end by a natural death appointed by God, the other his end
by a violent death, not so appointed. The "Philosophers" are
said to have held that one ajal would be when the mechanism of the
body ceased to work through the failing of its essential moisture
and heat, and another ajal might come through sicknesses and ac
cident generally.
312 APPENDIX I
And those believers who commit great sins do not remain
eternally in the Fire although they die without repentance.
Belief (iman) is assent (tasdiq) to that which comes from
God and confession (iqrar) of it. Then, as for Works (amal),
they are acts of obedience and gradually increase of them
selves, but Belief does not increase and does not diminish.
And Belief and al-Islam are one.* And whenever assent and
confession are found in a creature, it is right that he should
say, " I am a believer in truth." And it is not fitting that he
should say, " I am a believer if God will." *
The happy one sometimes becomes miserable and the miser
able one sometimes becomes happy,* and the changing is in
happiness and misery, and not in making happy and making
miserable : for those are both qualities of God Most High,
and there is no changing in Him nor in His qualities.
And in the sending of Apostles (rasuls) is an advantage and
God has sent Apostles of flesh unto flesh with good tidings,
warning and explaining to men the things of the world and of
faith, of which they have need. And He has aided them with
miracles (mu jizat) which break the order of nature. The first
of the Prophets (nabis) was Adam and the last is Muhammad,
Upon both of them be Peace ! A statement of their number
has been handed down in several traditions, but the more
fitting course is that there should be no limiting to a num
ber in naming them ; God Most High has said, " Of them are
those concerning whom We have recited to thee, and of them
are those concerning whom We have not recited to thee."
And there is no security in a statement of number against
there being entered among them some that are not of them,
or of there being excluded from them some that are of them.
They all give intelligence concerning God Most High, are
veracious and sincere, and the most excellent of the Prophets
is Muhammad Upon him be Peace !
The Angels are servants of God and work according to His
commands. They are not described as masculine or feminine.
And God has books which He has revealed to His Prophets,
and in them are His commands and His promises.
AN-NASAFI 313
The Night Journey (mi raj) of the Apostle of God Upon
whom be Blessing and Peace ! while awake, in the body, to
Heaven, then to what place God Most High willed of the
Exalted Regions, is a Verity.
The Wonders (karamat) of the Saints (walls] are a Verity. And
a Wonder on the part of a Saint appears by way of a contra
diction of the ordinary course of nature, such as passing over
a great distance in a short time, and the appearing of meat and
drink and clothing at a time of need, and walking upon the
water and in the air, and the speech of stones and of beasts,
and the warding off of an evil that is approaching, and the
guarding of him who is anxious from enemies, and other
things of the same kind. And such a thing is to be reckoned
as an evidentiary miracle (mu jizd) on behalf of the Apostle
followed by the Saint on whose part the wonder appears. For
it is evident by it that he is a Saint and he could never be a
Saint unless he were right in his religion and worship and in
abiding by the message committed to his Apostle.
The most excellent of mankind after the Prophets are Abu
Bakr, the Very Veracious (as-Siddiq), then Umar, the Divider
(al-Faruq), then Uthman, he of the Two Lights (Dhu-n-Nur-
ayn] , then Ali The good-will of God be upon them ! Their
Khalifates were in this order, and the Khalifate extended to
thirty years ; then, thereafter, came kings and princes.
The Muslims cannot do without a leader (Imam) who shall
occupy himself with the enforcing of their decisions, and in
maintaining their boundaries and guarding their frontiers,
and equipping their armies, and receiving their alms, and
putting down robberies and thieving and highwaymen, and
maintaining the Friday services and the Festivals, and remov
ing quarrels that fall between creatures, and receiving evi
dence bearing on legal claims, and marrying minors, male and
female, and those who have no guardians, and dividing booty.
And it is necessary that the leader should be visible, not hid
den and expected to appear (muntazar), and that he should be
of the tribe of Quraysh and not of any other. And he is not
assigned exclusively to the sons of Hashim nor to the children
314 APPENDIX I
of All. And it is not a condition that he should be protected
by God from sin (isma), nor that he should be the most ex
cellent of the people of his time, but it is a condition that he
should have administrative ability, should be a good governor
and be able to carry out decrees and to guard the restric
tive ordinances (hadds) of Islam and to protect the wronged
against him who wrongs him. And he is not to be deposed
from the leadership on account of immorality or tyranny.
Prayer is allowable behind anyone whether pure or a sin
ner. And we give the salutation of Peace to the pure and to
the sinner.
And we abstain from the mention of the Companions (sahibs)
of the Prophet except with good.
And we bear witness that Paradise is for the ten to whom
the Prophet God bless him and give him Peace ! gave
good tidings of Paradise (al-asharatu-l-mubashshara) .
And we approve the wiping (mash) of the inner-shoes (khuffs)
both at home and when on a journey.
And we do not regard nabidh as forbidden.
And the Saint does not reach the level of the Prophets.
And the creature does not come to a point where commands
and prohibitions and the details of the statutes in their out
ward sense (zahir) fall away from him ; and the turning aside
from these to the views which the People of the Inner Mean
ing (batin) assert is a deviation (ilhad) through unbelief.
And feeling safe from God is unbelief. And despairing of
God is unbelief. And rejection of the statutes and contempt;
for the law is unbelief. And believing a diviner (kahin) in
what he tells of the Unseen (ghayb) is unbelief. And what
does not exist (ma dum) is known of God Most High just as
what exists (mawjud) is known of Him and it [i.e., what does
not exist] is neither a thing (shay) nor an object of vision
(mar an).
And in prayer of the living for the dead, and in alms of
fered for them there is an advantage to them. And God Most
High answers prayers and supplies needs.
And what the Prophet has reported of the conditions of the
AL-FUDALI 315
last day (as-sa a), of the appearance of ad-Dajjal and of the
beast of the earth [of. Revelations xiii, 11 ff.] and of Fq/w/and
Majuj and the descent of Isa from heaven and the rising of
the sun in the west, that is verity.
And the Mujtahids sometimes err and sometimes hit the
mark. And the Apostles of mankind are more excellent than
the Apostles of the angels ; and the Apostles of the angels are
more excellent than the generality of mankind ; and the gen
erality of mankind of the true believers is more excellent than
the generality of the angels.
VI
THE CREED CALLED THE SUFFICIENCY OF THE COMMONALTY IN THE
SCIENCE OF SCHOLASTIC THEOLOGY, BY MUHAMMAD AL-FUDALI
[D. FIRST HALF OF THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY OF THE HIJRA]
[Translated from the Arabic text of Cairo, A.H. 1315, with the
commentary of al-Bayjuri.]
In the name of God, the merciful Compassionator. Praise belongeth
unto God who alone bringeth into existence, and blessing and peace
be upon our Lord Muhammad, his family and companions, posses
sors of beauty and guidance.
To proceed : The creature who stands in need of the mercy
of his exalted Lord, Muhammad ibn ash-Shan i al-Fudali
says : One of the brethren asked me that I should compose a
tractate on the divine unity (tawhid), and I agreed to that,
following the example of the most learned Shaykh, as-Sanusi,
[d. 895,] in the establishing of proofs, except that I adduced
each proof (dalil) in connection with the doctrine that was to be
proved, and added to it an exposition on account of my knowl
edge of the limitations of that student. So, in the ascription
of praise to God Most High, it became a tractate, useful and
excellent for the establishing of that which is in it. And I
called it, THE SUFFICIENCY OF THE PEOPLE IN THAT WHICH is
NECESSARY TO THEM OF THE SCIENCE OF SCHOLASTIC THEOLOGY
(kalam). And I pray God Most High that He will make it
316 APPENDIX I
useful, for He is my sufficiency, and excellent is the Guar
dian.
Know that it is incumbent upon every Muslim that he
should know fifty articles of belief (aqidas), and for each
article that he should know a proof, general (ijmali) or de
tailed (tafsili). Some say that it is required that he should
know a detailed proof, but the common opinion is that a gen
eral proof suffices for each article of the fifty. An example of
a detailed proof is when someone says, " What is the proof
of the existence (wujud) of God ? " that the answer should be,
"These created things." That the asker should then say,
"Do the created things prove the existence of God on the
side of their possibility or on the side of their existence after
non-existence (adam) ? " and that his question should be an
swered. And if the further question is not answered, but the
only answer is, " These created things," and the answerer does
not know whether it is on the side of their possibility or of
their existence after non-existence, then the proof is said to
be general ; but it is sufficient according to the common posi
tion. And with regard to taqlid (blind acceptance), which is
that fifty articles are known but no proof of them is known,
either general or detailed, the learned differ. Some say that it
does not suffice, and that the mukallad (blind accepter) is an un
believer (kafir). Ibn al-Arabi [d. 543] held this and as-Sanusi,
and the latter gave in his commentary on his kubra a lengthy
refutation of those who hold that taqlid is sufficient. Yet there
is a report that he retired from this position, and acknowl
edged the sufficiency of taqlid ; but I have never seen in his
books anything but the opinion that it does not suffice.
INTRODUCTION
Know that an understanding of the fifty following articles
must be based upon three things the necessary (wajib), the
impossible (mustahil), and the possible (ja iz). The necessary-
is that the non-existence of which cannot be apprehended by
the intellect (aql), that is, the intellect cannot affirm its
AL-FUDALI 317
non-existence, as boundary to a body (jirm), i.e., its taking up
a certain measure of space (faragk). An example of a body
is a tree or a stone. Then, whenever a person says to you,
that a tree, for example, does not take up room (mahall)
in the earth, your intellect cannot affirm that, for its taking
up room is a necessary thing, the absence of which your intel
lect cannot affirm. The impossible is that the existence of
which cannot be apprehended ; that is, the intellect cannot
affirm its existence. Then, whenever anyone says that such a
body is bare of motion and rest at the same time, your intel
lect cannot affirm that, because being bare of motion and rest
at the same time is an impossibility, the occurrence and ex
istence of which the intellect cannot affirm, and whenever it
is said that weakness (ajz) is impossible in God, the meaning
is that the occurrence or existence of weakness in God is un
thinkable. So, too, with the other impossibilities. And the
possible is that the existence of which at one time, and the
non-existence at another, the intellect can affirm, as the ex
istence of a child of Zayd s. When, then, someone says that
Zayd has a child, your intellect acknowledges the possibility of
the truth of that ; and whenever he says that Zayd has no child,
your intellect acknowledges the possibility of the truth of that.
So the existence and the non-existence of a child of Zayd
is possible ; the intellect can believe in its existence or in its
non-existence. And whenever it is said that God s sustaining
Zayd with a dinar is a possibility, the meaning is that the intel
lect assents to the existence of that sustaining (rizq) at one
time and to its non-existence at another.
On these three distinctions, then, is based the science of
the articles of belief ; and these three are necessary for every
mukallaf [one who has a task imposed upon him ; in this case
of religious duty], male and female, for that upon which the
necessary is based is necessary. The Imam al-Haramayn (d.
478) even held that an understanding of these three consti
tuted reason itself and that he who did not know the meaning
of necessary, impossible and possible, was not a reason ing
being. So, whenever it is said here that Power is necessary
318 APPENDIX I
(wajib) in God, the meaning is that the intellect cannot affirm
its non-existence, because the necessary is that the non-exist
ence of which the intellect cannot affirm, as has preceded.
But necessary (wajib, incumbent) in the sense of that the not
doing of which is punished, is an idea which does not enter
into the science of the divine Unity. So, do not let the mat
ter be confused for you. It is true that if one says that belief
in the Power of God is incumbent (wajib} on the mukallaf,
the meaning is that he is rewarded for that and punished for
omitting that. Thus there is a distinction between saying
that belief in such and such is incumbent and that the knowl
edge, for example, is necessary. For when it is said that
knowledge is necessary in God, the meaning is that the intel
lect cannot affirm the non-existence of knowledge in God.
But when it is said that belief in that knowledge is incum
bent, the meaning is that belief in it is rewarded and lack of
belief punished. So, apply thyself to the distinction between
the two and be not of those who regard taqlid in the articles
of Religion as right, that so your faith (iman) should differ
from the truth and you should abide in the Fire, according
to those who hold that taqlid does not suffice. As-Sanusi
said, "A person is not a Believer when he says, I hold by
the Articles and will not abandon them though I be cut in
pieces ; nay, he is not a Believer until he knows each Article
of the fifty, along with its proof." And this science of theol
ogy must be studied first of all sciences, as may be gathered
from the commentary [by at-Taftazani, d. 791] on as-Sanusi s
Articles; for he made this science a foundation on which
other things are built. So a judgment as to anyone s cere
monial ablution (wudu] or prayer is not valid unless the per
son in question knows these articles or, on the other hand,
holds them without proof.
Now, let us state to you the fifty articles shortly, before
stating them in detail. Know, then, that twenty qualities
are necessary in God Most High, that twenty are impossible
in Him and that one is possible. This makes up forty-one.
AL-FUDALI 319
And in the case of the Apostles, four qualities are necessary,
four impossible and one possible. This makes up the fifty.
And there shall come an accurate account of doctrines along
with the statement of them, if it be the will of God Most
High.
The first of the qualities necessary in God is existence (wu-
jud) ; and there is a difference of opinion as to its meaning.
All except the Imam al-Ash ari and his followers hold that
existence is the state (hat) necessary to the essence so long as
the essence abides; and this state has no cause (ilia). And
the meaning of it being a state is that it does not attain to
the degree of an entity (mawjud) and does not fall to the
degree of a non-entity (ma dum), so that it should be non-
existence pure, but is half way between an entity and a non
entity. So the existence of Zayd, for example, is a state
necessary to his essence ; that is, it cannot be separated from
his essence. And when it is said that it has no cause, the
meaning is that it does not originate in anything, as opposed
to Zayd s potentiality (qadir, powerful), for example, which
originates in his power (qudrd). So Zayd s potentiality and
his existence are two states which subsist in his essence, un-
perceived by any of the five senses ; only, the first has a cause
in which it originates, and it is power, and the second has no
cause. This is the description of a personal state (hal nafsi)
and every state subsisting in an essence, without a cause, is a
personal quality (sifa nafsiya). It is that without which the
essence is unthinkable ; that is, the essence cannot be appre
hended by the intellect and comprehended except through its
personal quality, like limitation for a body. For, if you ap
prehend and comprehend a body, you have comprehended
that it is limited. So, according to this doctrine that exist
ence is a state the essence of God is not His existence and
the essences of the created things are not their existences.
But al-Ash ari and his followers hold that existence is the
self (ayn) of an entity, and according to their view the exist-
tence of God is the self of His essence and not an addition to
it externally, and the existence of a created thing is the self
320 APPENDIX I
of its essence. And, on this view, it is not clear how exist
ence can be reckoned as a quality, because existence is the
self of the essence, and a quality, on the other hand, as we
have seen already, is something else than the essence. But if
he makes existence a quality, then the thing is plain and the
meaning that existence is necessary in God, according to the
first view, is that the personal quality is a state established
in God; and its meaning, on the second view, is that the
essence of God is an entity with external reality, so that if the
veil were removed from us we would see it. The essence of
God, then, is a reality ; only, its existence is something else
than it, on the one view, and is it, on the other.
And the proof of the existence of God is the origin (huduth)
of the world ; that is, its existence after non-existence. The
world consists of bodies (jirms) like essences ; and accidents
(arads) like motion, and rest and colors. And the origin of
the world is a proof of the existence of God only because it is
not sound reasoning that it should originate through itself
without someone bringing it into existence. Before it ex
isted, its existence equalled its non-existence ; then, when it
entered existence and its non-existence ceased, we know that
its existence overbalanced its non-existence. But this exist
ence had previously equalled the non-existence ; and it is not
sound reasoning that it could overbalance the non-existence
through itself ; so that it is clear that there must have been
one who caused the overbalancing, other than itself, and it
is He that brought it into existence ; for it is impossible that
one of two equal things could overbalance the other without
an overbalancer. For example, before Zayd exists it is pos
sible that he may come into existence in such and such a
year and also that he may remain in non-existence. So, his
existence is equal to his non-existence. So, then, when he exists
and his non-existence ceases, in the time in which he exists,
we know that his existence is by a bringer-into-existence and
not through himself. The proof, in short, is that you say :
The world, consisting of bodies and accidents, is a thing
originated (hadith), i.e., an entity after non-existence. And
AL-FUDALI 321
every originated thing cannot help but have an originator
(muhdith). Therefore, the world must have had an originator.
This is what can be gained by an intellectual proof. But
as for the Originator being named by the Glorious and Lofty
Expression [i.e., Allah, God] or the other Names (asma),
knowledge of that is to be gained from the Prophets only.
So note this point carefully and also the proof which has pre
ceded, that the originating of the world is a proof of the ex
istence of Him Most High.
But as for the proof that the world has had an origin, know
that the world consists of bodies and accidents only, as has
preceded. And the accidents, like motion and rest, are orig
inated, because you observe their changing from existence to
non-existence and from non-existence to existence. You see
it is so in the motion of Zayd. His motion is lacking if he is
at rest ; and his rest is lacking if he is in motion. Then his
rest, which comes after his motion, exists after that it has
been lacking through motion ; and his motion, which comes
after his rest, exists after that it has been lacking through his
rest. And existence after non-existence means having an
origin. And bodies are inseparable from attributes, because
they are never free from either motion or rest. And whatever
is inseparable from a thing having origin must have origin ;
i.e., must be an entity after non-existence. So, the bodies are
originated also, like the attributes. The proof, in short, is
that you say : Bodies are inseparable from attributes and these
have an origin ; everything that is inseparable from that which
has an origin, itself has an origin ; therefore, bodies have an
origin. And the origin of the two things bodies and attri
butes that is their existence after non-existence, is a proof of
the existence of Him Most High, because everything having
an origin must have an originator, and there is no originator
of the world save God Most High alone, who has no partner
(sharik) as shall be shown in the proof of His Unity. This,
then, is the general proof, a knowledge of which is incumbent
upon every mukallaf, male and female, according to the opinion
of Ibn al-Arabi and as-Sanusi, who hold those who do not
322 APPENDIX I
know it to be unbelievers. So, beware lest there be a con
tradiction in your faith.
The second Quulity necessary in God is Priority (qidam) ;
its meaning is lack of beginning. And the meaning of God s
being Prior (qadim) is that there was no beginning to His ex
istence, as opposed to Zayd, for example. Zayd s existence
had a beginning and it was the creation from the drop from
which he was created. And there is a difference of opinion
whether Prior and Azall (eternal with respect to past time)
mean the same or not. Those who hold that they mean the
same, define them as that which has no beginning, and ex
plain "that which" by thing (shay}. That is, prior and
azali are the thing which has no beginning ; so the essence of
God and His qualities are included. And those who hold
that their meaning is different define prior as the entity which
had no beginning and azali as that which had no beginning,
covering thus both entity and nonentity, So azali is broader
than prior, but they both come together in the essence of God
and His existential qualities. The essence of God is azali
and His Power (qudra) is azali. But only azali is said of the
states (hals) like God s being powerful, in accordance with the
doctrine of the states. For God s being powerful is called
azali, in accordance with that doctrine, and is not called prior,
because in prior there must be existence, and " being power
ful " does not rise to the level of existence [to being an entity],
but is only a state (hal).
And the proof of God s Priority is that if He were not Prior
He would be a thing originated (hadith), because there is no
medium between the prior and the thing originated ; to every
thing of which priority is denied, origin belongs. But if God
were a thing originated, He would need an originator, and His
originator would need an originator, and so on. Then, if the
originators did not coincide, there would be the Endless
Chain (tasalsul), that is a sequence of things, one after another
to infinity ; and the Endless Chain is impossible. And if the
series of originators comes to an end by it being said that the
originator of God was originated by Him, then we have the
AL-FUDALI 323
Circle (dawr) and it is that one thing depends on another thing
which again depends on the first. For if God had an orig
inator, He would depend on this originator ; but the hypoth
esis is that God originated this originator and so the orig
inator depends on Him. But the Circle is impossible ; that
is, its existence is unthinkable. And that which leads to the
Circle and to the Chain, both being impossible, involves the
originating of God. So, the originating of God is impossible ;
for what involves an impossibility is impossible. The proof,
in short, is that you say, "If God were other than Prior,
through being a thing originated, He would have need of an
originator. Then the Circle or the Chain would be unavoid
able ; but they are both impossible. So, the originating of
God is impossible and His Priority is established ; and that is
what has been sought." This is the general proof of the
Priority of God, and by it the mukallaf escapes from the noose
of taqlid, the remainer in which will abide eternally in the
Fire, according to the opinion of Ibn al-Arabi and as-Sanusi,
as has preceded.
The third Quality necessary in God is Continuance (baqa).
The meaning of it is lack of termination of the existence ; and
the meaning of God s being continuing is that there is no end
to His existence. And the proof of God s continuance is that
if it were possible that any lack could be joined to Him, then
He would be a thing originated and would need an originator
and then the Circle or the Chain would necessarily follow. A
definition of each one of these two has preceded in the proof
of Priority and in the explanation that to a thing with which
non-existence is possible, priority must be denied. For the
existence of everyone to whom non-existence is joined is pos
sible, and everything whose existence is possible is a thing
originated, and everything originated requires an originator.
But Priority has been established for God by the preced
ing proof, and non-existence is impossible for everything for
which Priority has been established. So the proof of Con
tinuance in God is the same as the proof of Priority. That
proof, in short, is that you say, " If Continuance is not neces-
324 APPENDIX I
sary in Him, then Priority must be negated of Him. But
Priority cannot be negated on account of the preceding proof."
This is the general proof of Continuance, a knowledge of
which is incumbent on every individual. And similarly a
knowledge of every article is necessary and of its general
proof. Then, if some of the articles are known with their
proofs, and the rest are not known with their proofs, that is
not sufficient according to the opinion of those who do not
regard taqlid as sufficient.
The fourth Quality necessary in God is difference (mu-
khalafd) from originated things. That is, from created things
(makhluqat] , for God is different from every created thing,
men, Jinn, angels and the rest ; and it is not good that He
should be described with the descriptions which apply to cre
ated things, as walking, sitting, having members of the body,
for He is far removed (munazzah] from members of the body, as
mouth, eye, ear and the like. Then, from everything that is
in your mind of length and breadth and shortness and fat
ness, God is different ; He has removed Himself far from all
descriptions which apply to the creation. And the proof of
the necessity of this difference in God is that if any originated
thing resembled Him, that is, if it were laid down that God
could be described with any of the things with which an
originated thing is described, then He would be an originated
thing. And if God were an originated thing, then He would
need an originator, and His originator, another originator,
and so we would come necessarily to the circle or the chain,
and both of these are impossible. This proof, in short, is
that you say, " If God resembles a created thing in anything,
He is an originated thing, because what is possible in one of
two things resembling each other, is possible in the other.
But that God should be originated is impossible, for priority
is necessary in Him. And when being originated is denied
in Him, His difference from created things stands fast and
there is absolutely no resemblance between Him and the
originated things. This is the general proof, the knowledge
of which is necessary, as has preceded.
AL-FUDALI 325
The fifth Quality necessary in God is self -subsistence (qiyam
bin-nafs). That is in the essence ; and its meaning is that
there is independence of a locus (mahall, subject) and a speci
fier (mukhassis). The locus is the essence and the specifier is
the bringer-into-existence (mujid) ; then the meaning of God s
subsisting in Himself is that He is independent of an essence
in which He may subsist, or of a bringer-into-existence ; for
He is the bringer-into-existence of all things. The proof that
He subsists in Himself is that you say, " If God had need of a
locus, that is an essence, in which He might subsist, as white
ness has need of an essence in which it may subsist, He would
be a quality, as whiteness, for example, is a quality. But it
it is not sound to say of Him that He is a quality, for He is
described by qualities, and a quality is not described by qual
ities, so He is not a quality. And if He had need of a bringer-
into-existence, He would be an originated thing, and His
originator would be an originated thing also, and the Circle
or the Chain would necessarily follow. Then it stands fast
that He is the absolutely independent, that is, He is inde
pendent of everything. But the created thing that is inde
pendent is independent in a limited sense only ; that is, of one
thing in place of another. And may God rule thy guidance.
The sixth Quality in God is Unity (utydaniya}. It is unity in
essence and qualities and acts in the sense of absence of mul
tiplicity. And the meaning of God s being one in His es
sence is that His essence is not compounded of parts, and this
compounding is called internal quantity (Jcamm muttasil).
And in the sense that there is not in existence or in possibil
ity an essence which resembles the essence of God, this im
possibility of resemblance is called external quantity (kamm
munfasil). The unity, then, in the essence denies both quan
tities, external and internal. And the meaning of God s One
ness in qualities is that He has not two qualities agreeing in
name and meaning, like two Powers, or two Knowledges or
two Wills for He has only one Power and one Will and one
Knowledge, in opposition to Abu Sahl, who held that He had
knowledges to the number of the things known. And this, I
326 APPENDIX I
mean multiplicity in qualities, is called internal quantity in
qualities. Or the sense is, that no one has a quality resembling
a quality of God. And this, I mean anyone possessing a qual
ity, etc., is called external quantity in qualities. Oneness,
then, in qualities, negates quantity in them, internal and ex
ternal. And the meaning of God s Oneness in acts is that no
created thing possesses an act, for God is the creator of the
acts of created things, prophets, angels and the rest. And as
for what happens when an individual dies or falls into pain
on opposing himself to a saint (wali), that is by the creation of
God, who creates it when the saint is angry with the man who
opposes him. Do not then explain Oneness in acts by saying
that no other than God has an act like God s act, for that in
volves that some other than God has an act, but that it is not
like the act of God. That is false. God it is who is the cre
ator of all acts. What comes from you by way of movement
of the hand, when you strike Zayd, for example, is by the
creation of God. He has said (Qur. 37, 99), "God created
you, and what do ye do ? " And another than God being
possessor of an act is called external quantity in acts.
So the unity necessary in God denies the five impossible
quantities. Internal quantity in the essence makes the essence
a compound of parts ; external quantity means that there is
an essence which resembles it. Internal quantity in the qual
ities is that God has two Powers, for example ; external
quantity in them means that someone else has a quality which
resembles one of His qualities. External quantity in acts
means that some other than God possesses an act. These five
quantities deny the unity necessary in God. The meaning of
quantity is number (adad).
The proof that Unity is necessary in God is the existence of
the world. If God had a partner (sharik} in divinity (uluhiya),
the case could not be in doubt. Either they would agree on
the existence of the world, in that one of them would say,
" I will cause the world to exist," and the other would say, "I
will cause it to exist along with thee, that we may help one
another in it." Or they would disagree, and one of them
AL-FUDALI 327
would say, " I will cause the world to exist by my power,"
and the other, I will that the existence be lacking." Then,
if they agreed upon the existence of the world in that both of
them together caused it to exist, and it existed through their
action, that would necessarily involve the coincidence of two
impressors upon one impression, which is impossible. And
if they disagreed, it is plain that the will of one either would
be carried out or it would not be carried out . If the will of
one, rather than the other, is carried out, then the other
whose will is not carried out must be weaker. But our hy
pothesis was that he was equal in divinity to the one whose
will was carried out. So whenever weakness is established
in the case of the one, it is established in the case of the
other, for he is like the other. And if the wills of both are
not carried out, they are both weak. And upon every alterna
tive, that they agree or differ, the existence of a single thing
of the world is impossible ; because if they agree on its ex
istence, there necessarily follows the coincidence of two im
pressors upon one impression if their will is carried out, and
that is impossible. So the carrying out of their will is not
affected, and it is not possible that a single thing of the world
should come into existence then. And if they disagree and
the will of one of them is carried out, the other is weak. But
he is his like. So it is not possible that there should come
into existence a single thing of this world, for he is weak.
So the God is not except one. And if they differ and their
will is not carried out, they are weak and not able to cause the
existence of a thing of the world. But the world exists, by
common witness (mushahada). So it stands fast that the God
is one ; and that was what was sought. So the existence of
the world is proof of the Unity of God and that He has no
partner in any act, and no second cause in an action. He is
the independent (al-Ghani), the absolutely independent.
And from this proof it may be known that there is no im
pression, by fire or a knife or eating, upon anything, consist
ing of burning or cutting or satiety, but God makes the being
burnt in a thing which fire touches, when it touches it, and
328 APPENDIX I
being cut in a thing with which a knife is brought into con
tact, when it is brought into contact with it, and satiety at
eating and satisfaction at drinking. And he who holds that
fire burns by its nature (tab), and water satisfies by its nat
ure, and so on, is an unbeliever (kafir) by agreement (ijma).
And he who holds that it burns by a power (quwa) created in
it by God, is ignorant and corrupt, because he knows not the
true nature (haqiqa) of Unity.
This is the general proof a knowledge of which is incum
bent upon every individual, male and female : and he who
knows it not is an unbeliever, according to as-Sanusi and al-
Arabi. And may God rule thy guidance.
And Priority and Continuance and Difference from originated
things and Self-Subsistence and Unity are negative qualities
(sifat salabiya), that is, their meaning is negation and exclu
sion, for each of them excludes from God what does not be
seem Him.
The seventh Quality necessary in God is Power (qudra). It
is a quality which makes an impression on a thing that is ca
pable of existence or non-existence. So it comes into connec
tion (ta allaqa) with a non-entity and makes it an entity, as it
came into connection with you before you existed. And it
comes into connection with an entity and reduces it to a non
entity, as it comes into contact with a body which God desires
should become a non-entity, that is, a not-thing (la shay).
This connection is called accomplished (tanjizi) in the sense
that it is actual (bil-fi 1), and this accomplished connec
tion is a thing that takes place (hadith). But this quality has
also an eternal, potential connection (saluhi qadim), and it is
its potentiality from eternity of bringing into existence. It is
potential in eternity to make Zayd tall or short or broad, or
give him knowledge ; but its accomplished connection is con
ditioned by the state in which Zayd is. So it has two connec
tions ; one eternal, potential, which has been described, and
one accomplished, happening. The last is its connection with
a non-entity, when it makes it an entity ; and with an entity,
when it makes it a non-entity. And this, I mean its connection
AL-FUDALI 329
with an entity or a non-entity, is a real (haqiqi) connection.
But it has also a figurative (majazi) connection. That is, its
connection with an entity after it has become so and before it
has become a non-entity, as it is connected with us after we
have come to exist and before we have ceased to exist. It is
called the connection of grasping (ta ( alluqu-l-qabdati) in the
sense that the entity is in the grasp (qabda) of the Power of
God. If God will, He makes it remain an entity ; and if He
will, He reduces it to non- entity. And its connection with
the non-entity before that God wills its existence is like its
connection with Zayd at the time of the Flood (tufan), for ex
ample ; it also is a connection of grasping in the sense that
the non-entity is in the grasp of the Power of God. If God
wills, He makes it remain in non-existence, and if He wills,
He brings it out into existence. And similar is its connection
with us after our death and before the resurrection (ba tk).
It, too, is called a connection of grasping in the sense of what
has preceded. So the quality of Power has seven connec
tions : (1) eternal, (2) connection of grasping (that is, its con
nection with us before God wills our existence), (3) actual con
nection (that is, God s bringing the thing into existence),
(4) connection of grasping (that is, connection with a thing
after existence and before God has willed non-existence),
(5) actual connection (that is, God s making a thing a non-en
tity), (6) connection of grasping after non-existence and before
the resurrection, (7) actual connection (that is, God s making
us exist on the day of resurrection).
But the real connections of these are two ; God s bringing
into existence and bringing into non-existence. This is a
detailed statement ; and a general statement would be that
God s Power has two connections as is commonly accepted
a potential and an accomplished ; but the accomplished is
limited to actual bringing into existence and non-existence.
And the connection of grasping is not to be described as
accomplished, nor as eternal. And what has preceded about
this quality connecting with existence and non-existence is
the opinion of the multitude on the subject. But some hold
380 APPENDIX I
that it does not connect with non-existence ; that whenever
God desires the non-existence of an individual, He takes away
from him the aids (imdadai) which are the cause of his con
tinuance.
The eighth Quality necessary in God is Will (irada). It is
the quality which specifies the possible with one of the things
possible to it. For example, tallness and shortness are pos
sible to Zayd; then Will specifies him with one, tallness,
say. Power brings tallness out of non-existence into exist
ence. So Will specifies and Power brings out. And the
possibilities (mumkinat) with which Power and Will connect
are six : (1) existence, (2) non-existence, (3) qualities, like
tallness and shortness, (4) times, (5) places, (6) directions.
And the possibilities are called "the mutual opposers"
(mutaqabilat), existence opposes non-existence and tallness
opposes shortness and direction upward opposes direction
downward, and one place, like Egypt, opposes another place,
like Syria. And this, in short, means that it is possible in
the case of Zayd, for example, that he should remain in non-
existence and also that ho should enter existence at this time.
Then, whenever he enters existence, Will has specified exist
ence instead of non-existence, and Power has brought out
existence. And it would have been possible that he might
have entered existence at the time of the Flood (tufan) or at
some other time ; so that which specifies his existence at this
time instead of any other is Will. And it is possible that he
should be tall or short ; then that which specifies his tallness
instead of shortness is Will. And it is possible that he should
be in the direction upward, then that which specifies him in
the direction downward is Will. And Power and Will are
two qualities subsisting in God s essence two entities ; if the
veil were removed from us we could see them . They have
connection with the possible only ; but none with the impos
sible, such as a partner for God. He is far removed from
that ! Nor with the necessary, like the essence of God and
His qualities. Ignorance is the saying of those who hold
that God has power to take a son (walad] ; for Power has no
AL-FUDALI 331
connection with the impossible and taking a son is impossible.
But it should not be said that because He has no power to
take a son, He is therefore weak. We say that weakness
would follow only if the impossible were of that which is
allotted to Power. But Power has not been connected with
that, seeing that nothing is allotted to it except the possible.
And Will has two connections, one eternally potential, and it
is its potentiality to specify from all eternity. So, in the case
of the tall or the short Zayd, it is possible that he might be
otherwise than what he is, so far as relationship to the poten
tiality of Will is concerned. For Will is potential that Zayd
should be a Sultan or a scavenger, so far as the potential
connection is concerned. And Will has also an eternal ac
complished connection, and it is the specifying by God of a
thing with a quality which it possesses. So God specified
Zayd from all eternity by His Will with the knowledge that
he possesses. And his being specified with knowledge, for
example, is eternal and is called an eternal accomplished con
nection. And the potentiality of Will to specify him with
knowledge, etc., in relationship to the essence of Will, cut
ting off all consideration of actual specifying, is called an
eternal potential connection. And some say that Will has also
a temporal, accomplished connection. It is, for example, the
specifying of Zayd with tallness, when he is actually brought
into existence. According to this view, Will has three con
nections ; but the truth is that this third is not a connection
but is the making manifest of the eternal, accomplished con
nection.
And the connection of Power and Will is common to every
possible thing to the extent that the affections of the mind
(khatarat] which arise in the mind of an individual are speci
fied by the Will of God and created by His Power as the
Shaykh al-Malawi [Ahmad al-Malawi, d. 1181] has said in
some of his books. But know that the attributing of specify
ing to Will and of bringing out into existence to Power is
only metaphorical ; for the true specifier is God by His Will
and the true producer and bringer-into-existence is God by
332 APPENDIX I
His Power. Then, in the case of the saying of the common
people that Power does such and such to so and so, if it is
meant that the doing belongs to Power actually, or to it and
to the essence of God, that is unbelief (kufr). Rather, the
doing belongs to the essence of God by His Power.
The ninth Quality necessary in God is Knowledge (Urn).
It is an eternal quality subsisting in the essence of God, an
entity by which what is known is revealed with a revealing of
the nature of complete comprehension (ihata), without any
concealment having preceded. It is connected with the
necessary, the possible and the impossible. He knows His
own essence aud qualities by His Knowledge . And He knows
impossibilities in the sense that He knows that a partner is
impossible to Him and that, if one existed, corruption would
accrue from it. And Knowledge has an eternal, accomplished
connection only. For God knows these things that have been
mentioned from all eternity with a complete knowledge that
is not by way of opinion (zann) or doubt (shakk] ; because
opinion and doubt are impossibilities in God. And the mean
ing of the saying, "without any concealment having pre
ceded," is that He knows things eternally ; He is not first
ignorant of them and then knowing them. But an origi
nated being (hadith) is ignorant of a thing and then knows it.
And God s Knowledge has no potential connection in the sense
that there is a potentiality that such and such should be
revealed by it, because that involves that the thing in ques
tion has not been actually revealed, and lack of actual reveal
ing of it is ignorance.
The tenth Quality necessary in God is Life (hayali). It is
a quality which in him in whom it subsists validates percep
tion, as knowledge and hearing and seeing : that is, it is valid
that he should be described therewith. But being character
ized by actual perception does not necessarily follow from
possessing the quality, Life. And it is not connected with
anything, entity or non-entity.
The proof that Knowledge and Power and Will and Life
are necessary is the existence of the created things. Because,
AL-FUDALI 333
if any one of these four is denied, why does the created world
exist ? So, since the created things exist, we know that God
is to be described by these qualities. And the reason of the
existence of the created things depending on these four is
this. He who makes a thing does not make it except when
he knows the thing. Then he wills the thing which he would
make and, after his willing, he busies himself with making it
by his power. Further, it is known that the maker cannot
but be living. And Knowledge and Will and Power are
called qualities of impression (si/at at-ta thir), for making an
impression depends upon them. Because he who wills a
thing must have knowledge of it before he aims at it ; then,
after he has aimed at it, he busies himself with doing it. For
example, when there is something in your house and you
wish to take it, your knowledge precedes your wish to take
it, and after your wish to take it, you take it actually. The
connection of these qualities, then, is in a certain order, in
the case of an originated being ; first comes the knowledge of
the thing, then the aiming at it, then the doing. But in the
case of God, on the other hand, there is no sequence in His
qualities, except in our comprehension ; in that, Knowledge
comes first, then Will, then Power. But as for the making
of an impression externally, there is no sequence in the qual
ities of God. It is not said that Knowledge comes into
actual connection, then Will, then Power; because all that
belongs to originated beings. Order is only according to our
comprehensions .
The eleventh and twelfth Qualities of God are Hearing
(sam) and Seeing (basar). These are two qualities subsisting
in the essence of God and connected with every entity ; that
is, by them is revealed every entity, necessary or possible.
And Hearing and Seeing are connected with the essence of
God and His qualities ; that is, His essence and qualities are
revealed to Him by His Seeing and Hearing, besides the re
vealing of His Knowledge. And God hears the essences of
Zayd and Amr and a wall and He sees them. And He hears
the sound of the possessor of a sound and He sees it, that is
334 APPENDIX I
the sound. Then, if you say, " Hearing a sound is plain, but
hearing the essence of Zayd and the essence of a wall is not
plain ; so, too, the connection of seeing with sounds, for
sounds are heard only," we reply, " Belief in this is incum
bent upon us because these two qualities are connected with
every entity ; but the how ( kayfiya] of the connection is un
known to us. God hears the essence of Zayd, but we do not
know how hearing is connected with that essence. And it is
not meant that He hears the walking of the essence of Zayd,
for the hearing of his walking enters into the hearing of all
the sounds (sawt), but what is meant is that He hears the
essence of Zayd and his body (jutktha), besides hearing his
walking. But we do not know how the hearing of God is
connected with the person (nafs) of the essence. This is what
is binding upon every individual, male and female Our trust
is in God !
The proof of Hearing and Seeing is the saying of God that
He is a Hearer and Seer. And know that the connection of
Hearing and Seeing in relation to originated things is an
eternal, potential connection before the existence of these,
and after their existence it is a temporal, accomplished con
nection. That is, after their existence, they are revealed to
God by His Hearing and Seeing besides the revealing of His
Knowledge. So they have two connections. And in relation
to God and His qualities, the connection is eternal, accom
plished, in the sense that His essence and His qualities are
revealed to Him from all eternity through His Hearing and
Seeing. So, God hears His essence and all His existential qual
ities [all except the states and the negative qualities], Power,
Hearing, and all the rest ; but we do not know how the con
nection is, and He sees His essence and His qualities of ex
istence, Power, Seeing and the rest, but again we do not
know how the connection is. The preceding statement that
Hearing and Seeing are connected with every entity is the
opinion of as-Sanusi and those who follow him ; it is the
preponderating one. But it is said, also, that Hearing is
only connected with sounds and Seeing with objects of vision.
AL-FTJDALI 335
And God s Hearing is not with ear or ear-hole, and His Seeing
is not with eyeball or eyelid.
The thirteenth Quality of God is Speech (kalam). It is an
eternal quality, subsisting in God s essence, not a word or
sound, and far removed from order of preceding and follow
ing, from inflection and structure, opposed to the speech of
originated beings. And by the Speech that is necessary to God
is not meant the Glorious Expressions (lafz) revealed to the
Prophet, because these are originated and the quality that
subsists in the essence of God is eternal. And these embrace
preceding and following, inflection and chapters and verses ;
but the eternal quality is bare of all these things. It has no
verses or chapters or inflections, because such belong to the
speech which embraces letters and sounds, and the eternal
quality is far removed from letters and sounds, as has pre
ceded. And those Glorious Expressions are not a guide to
the eternal quality in the sense that the eternal quality can
be understood from them. What is understood from these
expressions equals what would be understood from the eternal
quality if the veil were removed from us and we could hear
it. In short, these expressions are a guide to its meaning,
and this meaning equals what would be understood from the
eternal Speech which subsists in the essence of God. So medi
tate this distinction, for many have erred in it. And both
the Glorious Expressions and the eternal quality are called
Qur an and the Word (kalam} of God. But the Glorious Ex
pressions are created and written on the Preserved Tablet
(al-lawh-al-mahfuz) ; Jibril brought them down [i.e., revealed
them] to the Prophet after that they had been brought down
in the Night of Decree (laylatu-l-qadr ; Qur. 97, 1) to the
Mighty House (baytu-l-izza), a place in the Heaven nearest to
the earth ; it was written in books (sahifas) and placed in the
Mighty House. It is said that it was brought down to the
Mighty House all at once and then brought down to the
Prophet in twenty years, and some say, in twenty-five. And
it is also said that it was brought down to the Mighty House
only to the amount that was to be revealed each year and not
all at once.
336 APPENDIX I
And that which was brought down to the Prophet was ex
pression and meaning. And it is said also that only the mean
ing was brought down to him. There is a conflict of opinion
on this ; some say that the Prophet clothed the meaning with
expressions of his own, and others, that he who so clothed the
meaning, was Jibril. But the truth is that it was sent down
in expressions and meaning. In short, the quality subsisting
in the essence of God is not a letter nor a sound. And the
Mu tazilites called in doubt the existence of a kind of Speech
without letters. But the People of the Sunna answered that
because thoughts in the mind (hadiih an-nafs), a kind of
speech with which an individual speaks to himself, are with
out letter or sound, there exists a kind of speech without let
ters or words. By this the People of the Sunna do not wish
to institute a comparison between the Speech of God and
thoughts in the mind ; for the Speech of God is eternal and
thoughts in the mind are originated. They wished to dis
prove the contention of the Mu tazilites when they urged that
speech cannot exist without letter or sound.
The proof of the necessity of Speech in God is His saying
(Qur. 4, 162) ; " and God spoke to Moses." So He has estab
lished Speech for Himself. And Speech connects with that
with which Knowledge connects, of necessary and possible
and impossible. But the connection of Knowledge with these
is a connection of revealing, in the sense that they are re
vealed to God by His Knowledge ; and the connection of
Speech with them is a connection of proof, in the sense that
if the veil were taken away from us and we heard the eternal
Speech we would understand these things from it.
The fourteenth Quality subsisting in God is Being Power
ful (kawn qadir). It is a Quality subsisting in His essence,
not an entity and not a non-entity. It is not Power, but be
tween it and Power is a reciprocal inseparability. When
Power exists in an essence, the quality called " Being Power
ful " exists in that essence, equally whether that essence is
eternal or originated. So, God creates in the essence of Zayd
Power actual, and He creates also in it the quality called
AL-FUDALI 337
Zayd s Being Powerful. This quality is called a state (hal)
and Power is a cause (ilia] in it in the case of created things.
But in the case of God, Power is not said to be a cause in His
Being Powerful ; it is only said that between Power and God s
Being Powerful there is a reciprocal inseparability. The
Mu tazilites hold also the reciprocal inseparability between
the Power of an originated being and its Being Powerful.
But they do not say that the second quality is by the creation
of God, only that when God creates Power in an originated
being, there proceeds from the Power a quality called Being
Powerful, without creation.
The Fifteenth Quality necessary in God is Being a Wilier
(kawn murid). It is a quality subsisting in His essence, not
an entity and not a non-entity. It" is called a state (hal) and it
is not Will, equally whether the essence is eternal or created.
So, God creates in the essence of Zayd Will actual, and He
creates in it the quality called Zayd s Being a Wilier. And
what is said above, about the disagreement between the Mu
tazilites and the People of the Sunna on Being Powerful, ap
plies also to Being a Wilier.
[The same thing applies exactly to Qualities Sixteen, Sev
enteen, Eighteen, Nineteen and Twenty, Being a Knower
(alim), a Living One (hayy], a Hearer (sami), a Seer (basir), a
Speaker (mutakallim). ]
NOTICE. The Qualities, Power, Will, Knowledge, Life,
Hearing, Seeing, Speech, which have preceded, are called,
" Qualities consisting of ideas " (sifat al-ma ani, thought-
qualities as opposed to active qualities ; see below) ; on account
of the connection of the general with the particular (idafatu-
l-amm lil-khass), or the explanatory connection (al-idafatu-l-
bayaniya). And those which follow these, God s Being Pow
erful, etc., are called " Qualities derived from ideas " (sifat ma (
nawiya), by way of derivation (nisba) from the "Qualities
consisting of ideas," because they are inseparable from them
in a thing eternal and proceed from them in a thing originated,
according to what has preceded.
And the Mataridites added to the " Qualities consisting of
338 APPENDIX I
Ideas," an Eighth Quality and called it, Making to Be (tak-
loiri). It is a quality and an entity like the rest of the "Qual
ities consisting of Ideas " ; if the veil were removed from us
we would see it, just as we would see the other " Qualities
consisting of Ideas " if the veil were removed from us. But
the Ash arites opposed them and urged that there was no ad
vantage in having a quality, Making to Be, besides Power,
because the Mataridites said that God brought into existence
and out of existence by the quality of Making to Be. Then
these replied that Power prepared the possibility for existence,
that is, made it ready to receive existence after it had not
been ready ; that thereafter Making to Be brought it into ex
istence actually. The Ash arites replied that the possible was
ready for existence without anything further. And on ac
count of their having added this quality, they said that the
active qualities (si/at al-af al), such as Creating (khalq),
Bringing to Life (/%), Sustaining (razq), Bringing to Death
(imata), were eternal, because these expressions are names of
the quality Making to Be, which is a quality and an entity, ac
cording to them. But it is eternal ; therefore these active
qualities are eternal. But according to the Ash arites, the
active qualities are originated, because they are only names
of the connections of Power. So Bringing to Life is a name
for the connection of Power with Life, and Sustaining is a
name for the connection of Power with the creature to be sus
tained, and Creating is a name for its connection with the
thing to be created, and Bringing to Death, a name for its
connection with death. And the connections of Power, ac
cording to them, are originated.
And among the Fifty Articles are twenty which express the
opposites of the twenty above. They are Non-existence, the
opposite to Existence.
The Second, Origin (kudutfi), is the opposite of Priority.
The Third, Transitoriness (fana), is the opposite of Con
tinuance.
The Fourth, Resemblance (mumathala), is the opposite of
Difference. It is impossible that God should resemble orig-
AL-FUDALI 339
inated things in any of those things with which they are de
scribed ; time has no effect upon Him and He has not a place
or movement or rest ; and He is not described with colors or
with a direction ; it is not said with regard to Him that He is
above such a body, or on the right of such a body. And He
has no direction from Him. So it is not said, " I am under
God." And the saying of the commonalty, ft I am under our
Lord," and "My Lord is over me," is to be disapproved.
Unbelief is to be feared on the part of him who holds the use
of it to be an article of his faith.
The Fifth is having need of a locus (iJitiycty ila mahall), that
is, an essence in which He may subsist, or a Specifier, that is
a bringer-into-existence. This is the opposite of Self-sub
sistence.
The Sixth is Multiplicity (ta addud), in the sense of com
bination in the essence or the qualities, or the existence of a
being similar in essence or qualities or acts. This is the op
posite of Unity.
The Seventh is Weakness (ctjz) and it is the opposite of
Power. So, being unequal to any possibility is impossible in
God.
The Eighth is Unwillingness (karaha, lit. dislike). It is the
opposite of Will, and it is impossible in God that He should
bring into existence anything of the world, along with Un
willingness toward it, that is, lack of Will. Entities are pos
sibilities which God brought into existence by His Will and
Choice (ikTitiyar}. And it is derived from the necessity of Will
in God, that the existence of created things is not through
causation (ta lil), or by way of nature (tab}. And the dif
ference between the two is that the entity which exists through
causation is whatever exists whenever its cause exists, without
dependence on another thing. The movement of the finger
is the cause of the movement of the ring ; when the one exists,
the second exists, without dependence on anything else. And
the entity which exists, by way of nature, depends upon a
condition and upon the nullifying of a hindrance. So, fire
does not burn except on the condition of contact with wood
340 APPENDIX I
and the nullifying of moistness which is the hindrance of its
burning. For fire burns by its nature according to those who
hold the doctrine of nature Whom may God curse ! But
the truth is, that God creates the being burned in the wood
when it is in contact with the fire, just as He creates the
movement of the ring when movement of the finger exists.
And there is no such thing as existence through causation or
nature. So it is an impossibility in God that there should be
a cause in the world which proceeds from Him without His
choice, or that there should be a course of nature and that the
world should exist thereby.
The Ninth is Ignorance (jahl). Ignorance of any possible
thing is impossible in God, equally whether it is simple, that
is, lack of knowledge of a thing ; or compound, that is, per
ception of a thing as different from what it really is. And In
attention (ghafala) and Neglect (dhuhul) are impossible in
God. This is the opposite of Knowledge.
The Tenth is Death (mawt). It is the opposite of Life.
The Eleventh is Deafness (samam). It is the opposite of
Hearing.
The Twelfth is Blindness (amd). It is the opposite of See
ing.
The Thirteenth is Dumbness (kJiaras). In it is the idea of
Silence (bakam) and it is the opposite of Speech.
The Fourteenth is God s Being Weak (kawn ajiz). It is
the opposite of His Being Powerful.
The Fifteenth is His Being an Unwilling One (kawn karih}.
It is the opposite of His Being a Wilier.
The Sixteenth is His Being an Ignorant One (kawnjahil).
It is the opposite of His Being a Knower.
The Seventeenth is His Being a Dead One (kawn mayyit).
It is the opposite of His Being a Living One.
The Eighteenth is His Being Deaf (asamm). It is the op
posite of His Being a Hearer.
The Nineteenth is His Being Blind (a ma). It is the op
posite of His Being a Seer.
The Twentieth is His Being Silent (abkam). In it is the
AL-FUDALI 341
idea of Dumbness (kharas) and it is the opposite of His Being
a Speaker.
All these twenty are impossible in God. And know that the
proof of each one of the twenty qualities necessary in God
establishes the existence of that quality in Him and denies to
Him its opposite. And the proofs of the seven thought-quali
ties are proofs of the seven derived from these. Thus, there
are Forty Articles ; twenty of them are necessary in God ;
twenty are denied in Him ; and there are twenty general
proofs, each proof establishing a quality and annulling its
opposite.
NOTICE. Some say that things are four, entities, non-en
tities, states and relations (i tibaraf). The entities are like the
essence of Zayd which we see ; the non-entities are like your
child before it is created ; the states are like Being Powerful ;
and so, too, the relations, like the establishing of standing in
Zayd. This I mean that things are four is the view which
as-Sanusi follows in his Sughra, for he asserts in it the ex
istence of states and makes the necessary qualities to be twenty.
But elsewhere, he follows the opinion which denies states,
and that is the right view.
According to that view, the Qualities are thirteen in number,
because the seven derived qualities God s Being Powerful,
etc., drop out. God has no quality called Being Powerful,
because the right view is denial that states are things. Ac
cording to this, then, things are three : entities, non-entities
and relations. Then when the seven derived qualities drop
out from the twenty necessary qualities, seven drop also from
the opposites, and there is no quality called, Being Weak,
etc., and there is no need to number these among the im
possibilities. So, the impossibilities are thirteen also ; at
least, if existence is reckoned as a quality. That it should be
is the opinion of all except al-Ash ari. But the opinion of al-
Ash ari was that Existence is the self (ayn) of an entity. So,
the existence of God is the self of His essence and not a
quality. The necessary qualities, on that view, are twelve.
Priority and Continuance and Difference and Self -subsistence
342 APPENDIX I
expressed also as Absolute Independence and Unity and
Power and Will and Knowledge and Life and Hearing and
Seeing and Speech ; and the derived qualities drop out, be
cause their existence is based upon the view that there are
things called states ; but the right view is the opposite.
And if you wish to instruct the commonalty in the qualities
of God, then state them as names (asma) derived from the
qualities just mentioned. So it is said that God is an Entity.
Prior, Different from originated things, Independent of every
thing, One, Powerful, a Wilier, a Knower, Living, a Hearer,
a Seer, a Speaker. And they should know their opposites.
And know that some of the Shaykhs distinguish between
states and relationships and say of both that they are not en
tities and also not non-entities. But each has a reality in
itself, except that a state has a connection with and a subsist
ence in an essence, and a relation has no connection with an
essence. And it is said that a relation has a reality outside
of the mind. But to this it is opposed that a relation is a
quality, and if it has no connection with an essence and has a
reality outside of the mind, where is the thing qualified by it ?
A quality does not subsist in itself, but must needs have a
thing which it qualifies. So the truth is that relations have
no reality except in the mind. And they are of two kinds ;
the invented relation (i tibara ikhtira i), it is that which has no
ground in existence, as your making a generous man niggard
ly ; and second, the apprehended relation (intiza i, claiming),
it is that which has ground outside of your mind, as asserting
the subsistence of Zayd, for that may be claimed from your
saying, " Zayd subsists" ; so the describing of Zayd as sub
sisting is existent outside of your mind.
The forty-first Article is Possibility in the case of God.
It is incumbent upon every miikallaf that he should believe
that it is possible for God to create good and evil, to create
Islam in Zayd and unbelief in Amr, knowledge in one of them
and ignorance in the other. And another of the things, belief
in which is incumbent upon every miikallaf, is that the good
and the bad of things is by Destiny (qada) and Decree (qadar).
AL-FUDALI 343
And there is a difference of opinion as to the meaning of des
tiny and decree. It is said that destiny is the will of God
and the eternal (azali] connection of that will ; and decree is
God s bringing into existence the thing in agreement with the
will. So the Will of God which is connected eternally with
your becoming a learned man or a Sultan is destiny ; and the
bringing knowledge into existence in you, after your exist
ence, or the Sultanship, in agreement with the Will, is decree.
And it is said that destiny is God s eternal knowledge and its
connection with the thing known ; and decree is God s bring
ing things into existence in agreement with His knowledge.
So, God s knowing that which is connected eternally with a
person s becoming a learned man after he enters existence is
destiny, and the bringing knowledge into existence in that
man after he enters existence is decree. And according to
each of these two views, destiny is prior (qadim], because it is
one of the qualities of God, whether Will or Knowledge ;
and decree is originated, because it is bringing into existence,
and bringing into existence is one of the connections of Power,
and the connections of Power are originated.
And the proof that possible things are possible in the case
of God is that there is general agreement on their possibility.
If the doing of any possible thing were incumbent upon God,
the possible would be turned into a necessary thing. And if
the doing of a possible thing were hindered from Him, the pos
sible would be turned into an impossible. But the turning of
the possible into a necessary or an impossible is false. By
this, you may know that there is nothing incumbent upon
God, against the doctrine of the Mu tazilites, who say that it
is incumbent upon God to do that which is best (salaJi) for
the creature. So, it would be incumbent upon Him that He
should sustain the creature, but this is falsehood against Him
and a lie from which He is far removed. He creates faith in
Zayd, for example, and gives him knowledge out of His free
grace, without there being any necessity upon Him. And one
of the arguments which may be brought against the Mu tazil-
ites is that afflictions come upon little children, such as ail-
344 APPENDIX I
ments and diseases. And in this there is not that which is
best for them. So, if doing that which is best is incumbent
upon Him, why do afflictions descend upon little children ?
For they say that God could not abandon that which is incum
bent upon Him, for abandoning it would be defect, and God
is far removed from defect, by Agreement. And God s re
warding the obedient is a grace from Him, and His punishing
the rebellious is justice from Him. For obedience does not
advantage Him, nor rebellion injure Him ; He is the Advan-
tager and the Injurer. And these acts of obedience or rebellion
are only signs of God s rewarding or punishing those described
by them. Then him whom He wills to draw near to Himself,
He helps to obedience : and in him whose abandoning and
rejection He wills, He creates rebellion. And all acts of good
and bad are by the creation of God, for He creates the creat
ure and that which the creature does, as He has said (Qur.
37, 94), " and God hath created you and that which ye do."
And the belief is also incumbent that God may be seen in
the Other World by believers, for He has joined the seeing
(ru ya) of Him with the standing fast of the mountain in His
saying (Qur. 7, 139), "And if it standeth fast in its place, thou
wilt see Me." And the standing fast of the mountain was
possible : then, that which is connected with it of seeing must
also have been possible ; because what is connected with the
possible is possible. But our seeing God must be without
inquiring how (bila kayfa) ; it is not like our seeing one an
other. God is not seen in a direction, nor in a color, nor in a
body ; He is far removed from that. And_^he_Mu/tazilites--
may God make them vile ! deny the seeing of God. That is
one of their perverse and false articles of belief. And another
of their corrupt articles is their saying that the creature cre
ates his own actions. For this, they are called Qadarites, be
cause they say that the actions of the creature are by his own
qudra (power), just as the sect which holds that the creature
is forced to the action he does, is called Jabrite, derived from
their holding a being forced (jabr) on the part of the creature,
and a being compelled. It, too, is a perverse article. And
AL-FUDALI 345
the truth is that the . creature does not create his own actions
and is not forced, but that God creates the actions which issue
from the creature, along with the creature s having a free
choice (ikhtiyar} in them. As-Sa d [Sa d ad-Din at-Taftazani,
see above] said, in his commentary on the Articles, " It is not
possible to render this free choice by any expression, but
the creature finds a difference between the movement of his
hand when he moves it himself and when .the wind moves it
against his will."
And to that which is possible in God belongs also the send
ing of a number of Apostles (rasuls). And God s sending them
is by His, grace, and by way of necessity, as has preceded.
And it is necessary to confess that the most excellent of cre
ated beings, absolutely, is our Prophet [Muhammad], and
there follow him in excellency the rest of the Endowed with
Earnestness and Patience (ulu-l-azm; see Qur. 46, 34); they
are our Lord Ibrahim, our Lord Musa, our Lord Isa, and our
Lord Nuh ; and this is their order in excellency. And that
they are five along with our Prophet, and four after him is
the correct view. And it is said, too, that the Endowed with
Earnestness and Patience are more numerous. And there fol
low them in excellency the rest of the Apostles. Then, the
rest of the Prophets (nabis), then the Angels.
And it is necessary to confess that God has aided them with
miracles (mu jizat] and that He has distinguished our Prophet
in that he is the seal of the Apostles, and that his law
(shar) will not be abrogated till time is fulfilled. And Isa,
after his descent, will judge according to the law of our Proph
et. It is said that he will take it from the Qur an and the
Sunna, It is said also that he will go to the Glorious Tomb
[of Muhammad] and learn from him. And know that he will
abrogate one part of the law of our Prophet with a later part,
just as the waiting period of a woman after the death of her
husband was changed from a year to four months and ten days.
And in this there is no defect.
And it is necessary also that every mukallaf, male and
female, should know in detail the Apostles who are mentioned
346 APPENDIX I
in the Qur an, and should believe in them in detail. As for
the other Prophets, belief is necessary in them as a whole.
As-Sa d handed down an authority in his commentary on the
Maqasid that belief in all the Prophets as a whole suffices,
but he was not followed.
And someone put them into verse as follows :
* There is imposed upon every mukallaf a knowledge
Of Prophets in detail, who have been named
In that document of ours [i.e., the Qur an]. Of them are
eight
After ten [i.e., eighteen]. And there remain seven who are
Idris, Hud, Shu ayb, Salih, and similarly,
Dhu-1-Kifl, Adam, with the Chosen One [Muhammad] they
close."
And it is necessary to confess that the Companions (sahibs)
of the Prophet are the most excellent of the generations.
Then their followers (tabi s) ; then the followers of their fol
lowers. And the most excellent of the Companions is Abu
Bakr, then Umar, then Uthman, then Ali in this order.
But al-Alqami said that our Lady Fatima and her brother,
our Lord Ibrahim, were absolutely more excellent than the
Companions, including the Four [Khalifas]. And our Lord
Malik [ibn Anas] was wont to say, " There is none more
excellent than the children of the Prophet." This is that the
confession of which is incumbent ; and we will meet God con
fessing it, if it is His Will.
And of that the confession of which is also necessary, is
that the Prophet was born in Mecca and died in al-Madina.
It is incumbent on fathers that they teach that to their chil
dren. Al-Ajhuri said, * It is incumbent on the individual
that he know the genealogy of the Prophet on his father s
side and on his mother s." A statement of it will come in our
Conclusion, if God will. The learned have said, "Every
individual ought to know the number of the children of the
Prophet and the order in which they were born, for an individ-
AL-FUDALI 347
ual ought to know his Lords, and they are the Lords of the
People." But they do not explain, in what I have seen,
whether that is required (mawjub) or desired (mandub) ; the
analogy (qiyas) of things similar to it would say it was
required. His children were seven, three male and four
female, according to the right view. Their order of birth
was : al-Qasim, he was the first of his children, then Zaynab,
then Kuqayya, then Fatima, then Umm Kulthum, then Abd
Allah, he had the to-names (laqab) at-Tayyib and at-Tahir,
which are to-names of Abd Allah, not names of two other dif
ferent persons. These were all children of our Lady Khadija.
And the seventh was our Lord Ibrahim, born of Mariya, the
Copt. So it stands. Let us now return to the conclusion of
the Articles.
The Forty-second is the Veracity (sidq) of the Apostles in
all their sayings.
The Forty-third is their trustworthiness (amand), that is,
their being preserved (isma) from falling into things forbidden
(muharram) or disliked (makruh).
The Forty-fourth is their Conveying (tabligh) to the
creatures that which they were commanded to convey. The
Forty-fifth is intelligence (fatana). These four things are
necessary in the Apostles in the sense that the lack of them
is unthinkable. And Faith depends on the knowledge of
these, according to the controversy between as-Sanusi and his
opponents.
The opposites of these four are impossible in the Apostles,
that is, Lying (kidhb), Unfaithfulness (khiyana) in a thing
forbidden or disliked, Concealment (kitman) of a thing they
have been commanded to convey, and Stupidity (baladd).
These four are impossible in them, in the sense that the exist
ence of them is unthinkable. And Faith depends upon the
knowledge of these, as has preceded.
These are Nine and Forty Articles and the Fiftieth is the
possibility of the occurrence of such fleshly accidents in them
as do not lead to defect in their lofty rank.
And the proof of the existence of Veracity in them is that if
348 APPENDIX I
they were to lie. then information from God would be a lie,
for He has guaranteed the claim of the Apostles by the mani
festation of miracles at their hands. For the miracle is
revealed in place of an utterance from God, "My servant is
truthful in all that he brings from Me." That is, whenever
an Apostle comes to his people and says, " I am an Apostle to
you from God," and they say to him, "What is the proof of
your apostolate?" then he shall say, "The splitting of this
mountain," for example. And when they say to him, " Bring
what you say," God will split that mountain at their saying, as
a guarantee of the claim of the Apostle to the apostolate. So,
God s splitting the mountain is sent down in place of an utter
ance from God, "My servant is truthful in all which he
brings to you from Me." And if the Apostle were lying, this
information would be lying. But lying is impossible in the
case of God, so lying on the part of the Apostles is impossible.
And whenever lying is denied in them, Veracity is established.
And as for the proof of the Trustworthiness, that is, their
being preserved internally and externally from forbidden and
disliked things ; if they were unfaithful in committing such
things, we would be commanded to do the like. But it is
impossible that we could be commanded to do a forbidden or
disliked thing, "for God does not command a vile thing"
(Qur. 7, 27). And it is evident that they did nothing except
obedience, whether required or desired, and " permitted " (mu-
bak) things entered among their actions only to show, when
ever they did a "permitted " thing, that it was allowable (ja iz.)
And as for the proof of Intelligence, if it were failing in
them, how would they be able to establish an argument against
an adversary? But the Qur an indicates in more than one
place, that they must establish arguments against adversaries.
And such establishing of arguments is only possible with
intelligence.
And the proof that fleshly accidents do befall them is that
they do not cease to ascend in their lofty rank ; for the
occurrence of such accidents is in them for increase in their
lofty rank, for example, and that others may be consoled,
AL-FUDALI 349
and that the thoughtful may know that the world is not a
place of recompense for the lovers of God ; since if it were,
why should aught of the defilements of the world befall the
Apostles ? The Blessing of God be upon them and upon their
Mighty Head, our Lord Muhammad, and upon his family and
Companions and descendants, all !
The Fifty Articles are completed with their Glorious
Proofs.
Let us mention to you now somewhat of that which must
be held of the things whose proofs are authority (sam i):
Know that it must be believed that our Prophet has a Tank
(hawd) ; and ignorance as to whether it is on one side or the
other of the Bridge (as-sirat) does not hurt. On the Day of
Resurrection (yawm al-qiyamd) the creatures will go down to
drink of it. It is different from al-Kawthar, which is a
River in the Garden.
And it must also be believed that he will make intercession
(shafa a) on the Day of Resurrection in the midst of the Judg
ment, when we shall stand and long to depart, even though it
be into the Fire. Then he shall intercede that they may
depart from the Station (mawqif) ; and this intercession be
longs to him only.
And it must also be believed that falling into great sins
(kabiras), other than Unbelief (kufr} t does not involve Un
belief, but repentance (tawba) from the sin is necessary at
once ; and if the sin be a small one (saghird) repentance is
necessary to him who is liable to fall into it. And repent
ance is not injured by returning to sin ; but for the new sin a
new repentance is necessary.
And it is incumbent upon the individual that he set aside
arrogance (kibr] and jealousy (hasad) and slander (ghiba) on
account of what the Prophet has said, " The gates of the
Heavens have curtains which reject the works of the people of
arrogance, jealousy and slander." That is, they prevent them
from rising, and so they are not received. Jealousy is a
desiring that the well-being of another should pass away,
equally whether it is desired that it should come to the jeal-
350 APPENDIX I
OTIS one or not. And arrogance is considering the truth to
be falsehood and rejecting it, and despising God s creation.
And it is incumbent also upon him that he should not spread
malicious slanders among the people, for a tradition has come
down, "A slanderer (qattat) shall not enter the Garden."
And jealousy is forbidden, as is said above, when the well-
being does not lead its possessor to transgression, and if it
does, then desire that the well-being should pass away is
allowable.
It is necessary also to hold that some of those who commit
great sins will be punished, though it is only one of them.
CONCLUSION. Faith (imari), in the usage of the language, is
acknowledgment that something is true (tasdiq), in general.
In that way it is used by God, when he reports the words of
the sons of Ya qub (Qur. 12, 17). "But thou dost not believe
us [art not a believer (mu miri) in us]." Legally, it is belief
in all that the Prophet has brought. But there is a differ
ence of opinion as to the meaning of belief, when used in this
way. Some say that it means knowledge (ma rifa) and that
everyone who knows what the Prophet has brought is a be
liever (mu min). But this interpretation is opposed by the
fact that the unbeliever (kqfir) knows, but is not a believer.
Nor does this interpretation agree with the common saying,
that the muqallad is a believer, although he does not know.
And the right view as to the interpretation of belief is that it
is a mental utterance (hadith an-nafs) following conviction,
equally whether it is conviction on account of proof, which
is called knowledge, or on account of acceptance on authority
(taqlid). This excludes the unbeliever because he does not
possess the mental utterance, the idea of which is that you
say, " I am well pleased with what the Prophet has brought."
The mind of the unbeliever does not say this. And it includes
the muqallad ; for he possesses the mental utterance following
conviction, though the conviction is not based on a proof.
And of that which must be believed is the genealogy of the
Prophet, both on his father s side and on his mother s. On
his father s side he is our Lord, Muhammad, son of Abd
ABU SHUJA 351
Allah, son of Abd al-Muttalib, son of Haskim, son of Abd
Manaf, son of Qusay, son of Kilab, son of Murra, son of Ka b,
son of Lu ay, or Luway, son of Glialib, son of Fihr, son of
Malik, son of Nadr, son of Kinana, son of Khuzayma, son of
Mudrika, son of Alyas, son of Mudar, son of Nizar, son of
Ma add, son of Adnan. And the Agreement (ijma) unites upon
this genealogy up to Adnan. But after him to Adam there is no
sure path in that which has been handed down. And as to
his genealogy on his mother s side, she is Amina, daughter of
Wahb, son of Abd Manaf, son of Zuhra this Abd Manaf is
not the same as his ancestor on the other line son of Kilab,
who is already one of his ancestors. So the two lines of de
scent join in Kilab.
And it is necessary also to know that he was of mixed white
and red complexion, according to what some of them have
said.
This is the last of that which God has made easy by His
grace. His Blessing be upon our Lord Muhammad and
upon his family and his Companions and his descendants, so
so long as the mindful are mindful of him and the heedless
are heedless of the thought of him. And Praise belongeth
unto God, the Lord of the Worlds.
vn
ANALYSIS OF THE Taqrib OF ABU SHUJA AL-!SPAHANI*
Book I. Of Ceremonial Purity (Tahard)
1. The water which may be used for ceremonial ablutions.
2. Legal materials for utensils ; what can be purified and
what cannot.
3. The use of the toothpick.
* See in bibliography, S. Keijzer, Precis, etc. Much help as to
details of religious ritual and law will be found in Hughes s Diction
ary of Islam, Sachau s Muhammedanisches Recht, Lane s Modern
Egyptians^ and commentary to his translation of the Arabian
Nights, Burton s Pilgrimage, and Sell s Faith of Islam.
352 APPENDIX I
4. Description of the different stages of a ceremonial ablu
tion (wudu).
5. On cleansing from excrement and its ritual generally.
6. The five things which require a fresh wudu.
7. The six things which require a complete ablution of the
whole body (ghusl) and its ritual.
8. The seventeen occasions on which a ghusl is prescribed.
9. When it is allowable to wash the inner shoes (khuffs) in
stead of the feet.
10. The conditions and ritual for the use of sand (tayam-
mum) instead of water.
11. On uncleannesses (najasat) and how and how far they
can be removed.
12. On ailments of women ; duration of pregnancy and
their conditions.
Book II. Of Prayer
1. The times of prayer (salat).
2. Upon whom prayer is incumbent, and
3. On what occasions.
4. The antecedent requirements of prayer.
5. The eighteen essential parts of prayer.
6. The four things in which the prayer of a woman differs
from that of a man.
7. The eleven things which nullify prayer.
8. A reckoning of the occurrences of certain frequently re
peated elements in prayer.
9. On omissions in prayer.
10. The five occasions on which prayer is not allowable.
11. The duty and ritual of congregational prayer.
12. The prayer of a traveller.
13. The conditions under which congregational prayer is re
quired and those under which it is lawful.
14. The requirements in congregational prayer.
15. The prayers of the Two Festivals and their ritual.
16. The prayers on occasion of an eclipse.
17. Prayer for rain.
ABU SHUJA 353
18. Prayer in presence of the enemy.
19. What is forbidden of clothing.
20. The ritual of the dead.
Book III. Of Rates for the Poor, etc.
1. The condition of the rate (zakat) and of the rate-payer ;
what it is levied on and consists of.
2. On camels.
3. On cattle.
4. On sheep.
5. How it affects partners.
6. On gold and silver.
7. On grain-stuff.
8. On merchandise.
9. The conditions and nature of the rate to be paid at the
end of the fast.
10. Uses to which the rate may be applied.
Book IV. Of the Fast
1. The conditions for the fast (siyam) , its description;
what breaks it.
2. What is meritorious in fasting ; when and for whom
it is forbidden ; how breaking the fast must be expiated.
3. The conditions and nature of religious retreat (i tikaf).
Book V. Of the Pilgrimage
1. The conditions of pilgrimaging (hajj] ; its essentials and
other elements.
2. The ten things forbidden on pilgrimage.
3. The five sacrifices of the pilgrimage.
Book VI. Of Barter and Other Business Transactions
1. Conditions and kinds of barter (bay] ; what may be bar
tered and what not.
2. Description and conditions of the bargain with payment
in advance (salam).
354 APPENDIX I
3. Of pledging (rahn).
4. Of those who are not to be permitted to administer their
own property (hajar as-safih}.
5. Of bankruptcy and composition and common rights in a
highway (sulk).
6. The conditions for the transfer of debts and credits (ha-
wald) .
7. Of security for debts (daman).
8. Of personal security for debts (kafala).
9. Of partnership (shirkd).
10. Of agency (wakala).
11. Of confession (iqrar).
12. Of loans (i ara).
13. Of illegal seizure and use of property ; indemnity for it
and its damage (ghasfy.
14. Of right of pre-emption (sliuf a).
15. The conditions of advancing capital with participation
in the profits (qirad).
16. Of the letting of date-palms and vines (musaqat).
17. Of hiring a thing out (ijard).
18. Of reward for return of a thing lost (ja ala).
19. That land may not be let for a fixed amount of its
produce (mukhabara).
20. Of irrigation of waste lands (ihya al-mawat).
21. Of foundations in mortmain (waqf).
22. Of gifts (hiba).
23. Of found property (luqta).
24. Of foundlings (laqit).
25. Of deposits (wadi d).
Book VII. Of Inheritance and Wills
1. Of legal heirs (warith) .
2. The conditions and proportions of inheritance (faridd).
3. Of legacies (wasiya).
Book VIII. Of Marriage and Related Subjects
1. The conditions of marriage (nikah) . What women a man
may see and to what extent.
ABU SHUJA 355
2. The form of a legal marriage.
3. The conditions of asking (khitba) and giving in marriage ;
whom a man may not marry ; conditions for nullity of mar
riage .
4. The settlement (mahr) on a wife by her husband.
5. On the wedding feast (walima).
6. On the equality of the rights of the wives and the author
ity of the husband.
7. On divorce for incompatibility (JchuT).
8. The forms of divorce (talaq).
9. On taking a wife back and the three-fold divorce.
10. The oath not to cohabit (ila).
11. The temporary separation by the formula, zihar
Qur. 58.
12. The form of accusation of adultery and the defence
(li an).
13. The period during which a previously married woman
cannot remarry (idda).
14. Of relations with female slaves.
15. The support and behavior of a woman, divorced or a
widow ; mourning.
16. Law of relationship through suckling (irda).
17. The support (nafaqa) due to a wife.
18. The support due to children and parents, slaves and
domestic animals.
19. Of the custody of children (hidand).
Book IX. Of Crimes of Violence to the Person (jinaya)
1. On murder, homicide and chance medley.
2. The lex talionis (qisas) for murder, and
3. For wounds and mutilations.
4. The blood- wit (diya).
5. Use of weak evidence in case of murder.
6. Personal penance for homicide.
Book X. Of Restrictive Ordinances of God (hadd)
1. Of fornication (zina) of one who has been or is married
(muhsan), and of one who has not been or is not married.
356 APPENDIX I
2. Of accusing of fornication.
3. Of drinking wine or any intoxicating drink.
4. Of theft.
5. Of highway robbery.
6. Of killing in defence.
7. Of rebelling against a just government.
8. Of apostasy.
9. Of abandoning the usage of prayer.
Book XL Of the Holy War (jihad)
1. The general law of. jihad.
2. The distribution of booty taken in the field (ghanimd).
3. The law of the tax on unbelievers (fay).
4. The law of the poll-tax on unbelievers (jizya).
Book XII. Of Hunting and the Slaughter of Animals
1. How an animal may be killed in the chase or otherwise.
2. What flesh may be eaten.
3. The ritual of sacrifice (udhiya).
4. The ritual of sacrifice for a child (aqiqa).
Book XIII. Of Racing and Shooting with the Bow
Book XIV. Of Oaths and Vows (yamin, nadhr)
1. What oaths are allowable and binding ; how expiated.
2. Lawful and unlawful vows.
Book XV. Of Judgments and Evidence (qada, shahada)
1. Of the judge (qadi) and court usage.
2. The division (qasm) of property held in common.
3. Of evidence and oaths.
4. The conditions of being a legal witness (adil).
5. The difference of claims (haqq), on the part of God, and
on the part of man, and their legal treatment.
ABU SHUJA 357
Book XVI. Of Manumission of Slaves
1. General conditions of manumission (itq).
2. The clientship which follows (wala).
3. Of freeing at death (tadbir).
4. Of the slave buying his freedom (kitaba).
5. Of the slave (umm walad) that has borne a child to her
master or to another and of her children.
APPENDIX II
I. BOOKS AND ARTICLES, GENERAL AND FUNDAMENTAL, FOR
THE STUDY OF ISLAM.
II. ON MUSLIM HISTORY AND ON PRESENT CONDITION OF
MUSLIM WORLD.
III. ON MUSLIM TRADITIONS AND LAW.
IV. ON MUSLIM THEOLOGY, PHILOSOPHY AND MYSTICISM.
BOOKS AND ARTICLES, GENERAL AND FUNDAMENTAL, FOR THE
STUDY OF ISLAM
The non-Arabist will gain much insight into Muslim life
and thought by reading such translations as that of Ibn Khal-
likan by De Slane (Paris-London ; 1843-71), the Persian
Tabari, by Zotenberg (Paris ; 1867-74), Ibn Batuta by De-
fre*mery and Sanguinetti (Paris ; 1853-58), Mas udi by C.
Barbier de Meynard and Pa vet de Courteille (Paris ; 1861-77),
Ibn Khaldun s Prolegomenes by De Slane (Paris ; 1862-68),
ad-Dimishqi by Mehren (Copenhagen ; 1874), al-Beruni s
Chronology by Sachau (London ; 1879).
The translations and notes in De Sacy s Ckrestomathie arabe
(Paris ; 1826) can also be used to advantage.
Very many valuable articles will be found scattered through
the Zeitschrift of the German Oriental Society (hereafter
ZDMG), the Journal asiatique (hereafter JA), the Journal of the
Royal Asiatic Society (hereafter JRAS) and the Vienna Zeit
schrift fur die Kunde des Morgenlandes (hereafter Wz).
358
BIBLIOGRAPHY
It is always worth while to consult the Encyclopedia Bri-
tannica.
The best translations of the Qur an into English are those
by E. H. Palmer (2 vols., Oxford; 1880) and J. M. Bod well
(London; 1871). The first more perfectly represents the
spirit and tone, and the second more exactly the letter. The
commentary added by Sale to his version and his introduction
are still useful.
The TJiousancl and One Nights should be read in its entirety
in Arabic or in a translation by every student of Islam. English
translation by Lane (incomplete but accurate and with very
valuable commentary) ; Burton (last edition almost complete ;
12 vols., London : 1894). Payne s translation is complete, as is
also Burton s privately printed edition ; but, while exceeding
ly readable, Payne hardly represents the tone of the original.
There is an almost complete and very cheap German version
by Henning published by Keclam, Leipzig) ; Mardrus French
version is inaccurate and free to such an extent as to make it
useless. Galland s version is a work of genius ; but it belongs
to French and not to Arabic literature.
R. P. A. DOZY: Essai sur Phistoire de fislamisme. Leyden,
1879. A readable introduction.
A. MULLER: Der Islam im Morgen-und-Abendland. 2 vols.
Berlin, 1885, 1887. The best general history of Islam.
STANLEY LANE-POOLE : The Mohammedan Dynasties ; chrono
logical and genealogical tables with historical introductions. West"
minster, 1894. An indispensable book for any student of Muslim
history.
C. BROCKELMANN : Geschichte der arabischen Litteratur. 2
vols. Weimar, 1898, 1899. Indispensable for names, dates, and
books, but not a history in any true sense.
T. B. HUGHES : A Dictionary of Islam. London, 1896. Very
full of information, but to be used with caution. Based on Persian
sources largely.
E. W. LANE : An Account of the Manners and Customs of the
Modern Egyptians. First edition, London, 1836; third, 1842.
Many others. Indispensable.
360 APPENDIX II
C. M. DOUGHTY . Travels in Arabia Deserta 2 vols. Cam
bridge, 1888. By far the best book on nomad life in Arabia. Gives
the fullest and clearest idea of the nature and workings of the Arab
mind.
J. L. BIJRCKHARDT : Notes on the Bedouins and Wahabys. 2
vols. London, 1831.
J. L. BURCKHARDT : Travels in Arabia. 2 vols. London, 1829.
R. F. BURTON : Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to al-Ma-
dinah and Meccah. 2 vols. Last edition, London, 1898. On
the Hajj and Muslim life, thought and studies generally in the
middle of the nineteenth century. Readable and accurate to a
degree.
C. SNOUCK HURGRONJE : Mekka. 2 vols. and portfolio of plates.
Haag, 1888, 1889. Is somewhat dull beside Burton, but very full
and accurate.
W. ROBERTSON SMITH : Lectures on the Religion of the Semites.
First Series. New edition, London, 1894. Kinship and Mar
riage in Early Arabia. Cambridge, 1885.
IGNAZ GOLDZIHER : Muhammedanische Studien. I, Halle a. S.,
1889. II, 1890. Epoch-marking books; as are all Goldziher s
contributions to the history of Muslim civilization.
ALFRED VON KREMER : Geschichte der herrschenden Ideen des
Islams. Leipzig, 1868.
ALFRED VON KREMER : Culturgeschichte des Orients unter den
Chalifen. 2 vols. Wien, 1875-77. Culturgeschichtliche Streif-
ziige. Leipzig, 1873.
EDWARD G. BROWNE : A Year Among the Persians. London,
1893. A most valuable account of modern Persian life, philosophy,
and theology, and especially of Sufiism and Babism.
EDWARD G. BROWNE : A Literary History of Persia. New
York, 1902. Really political and religious prolegomena to such a
history.
G. A. HERKLOTS : Qanoon-e- Islam, or the Customs of the
Moosulmans of India. London, 1832.
BIBLIOGKAPHY 361
II
ON MUSLIM HISTORY AND ON PRESENT CONDITION OP MUSLIM
WORLD
AUGUST MULLER : Die Beherrscher der Glaubigen. Berlin, 1882.
A very brightly written sketch based on thorough knowledge.
GUSTAV WEIL: Geschichte der Chalifen. 3 vols. Mannheim,
1846-1851.
SIR WILLIAM Mum : The Caliphate, its Rise, Decline and Fall.
London, 1891.
THEODOR NOLDEKE : Zur tendentiosen Gestaltung der Urge-
schichte des Islams. ZDMG, Hi, pp. 16 ff. All Noldeke s papers
on the early history of Islam are worthy of the most careful study.
G. VON VLOTEN : Zur Abbasiden Geschichte. ZDMG, lii, pp. 213
ff. On the early Abbasids.
R. E. BRUNNOW : De Charidschiten unter den ersten Omayyaden.
Leyden, 1884.
EDUARD SACHAU : Uber eine Arabische Chronik aus Zanzibar.
Mitth. a.d. Sem. f. Orient. Sprachen. Berlin, 1898. On Ibadites.
GEORGE PERCY BADGER : History of the Imams and Seyyids
of Oman, by Salil-ibn-Razik. London : Hakluyt Society, 1871.
Valuable for Ibadite history, law and theology.
M. J. DE GOEJE : Memoire sur les Carmathes du Bahrain et les
Fatimides. Leyden, 1886.
JOHN NICHOLSON : An Account of the Establishment of the Fate-
mite Dynasty in Africa. Tubingen and Bristol, 1840.
QUATREMERE : Memoires historiques sur la dynastic des Khalifes
Fatimites. JA, 3, ii.
SYLVESTRE DE SACY : Expose de la religion des Druzes et la vie
du, Khalife Hakem-biamr-allah. 2 vols. Paris, 1838.
F. WUSTENFELD : Geschichte der Fatimiden-Khalifen. Gottin-
gen, 1881.
STANLEY LANE-POOLE : A History of Egypt in the Middle Ages.
New York, 1901. For the origin and founding of the Fatimid
Dynasty, the Khalifa al- Hakim, etc.
H. L. FLEISCHER : Briefwechsel zwischen den Anfilhrern der
Wahhabiten und dem Pasha von Damaskus. Kleinere Schriften,
iii, pp. 341 ff. First published in ZDMG for year 1857.
362 APPENDIX II
E. REHATSEK : The History of the Wahhtbys in Arabia and in
India. Journal of Asiatic Society of Bengal. No. xxxviii (read
January, 1880).
Turkey in Europe, by " Odysseus." London, 1900. The present
situation, with its historical antecedents in European Turkey and the
Balkans generally.
H. 0. DWIGHT : Constantinople and its Problems. New York,
1901.
A. S. WHITE : The Expansion of Egypt. London, 1899. The
present situation in Egypt and its historical antecedents.
W. W. HUNTER : Our Indian Mussulmans. London, 1871.
SIK LEWIS PELLY : The Miracle Play of Hasan and Husain.
London, 1879.
W. S. BLUNT : The Future of Islam. London, 1880.
Ill
ON MUSLIM TRADITIONS AND LAW
The Mishkat, translated by Matthews. Calcutta, 1809. (A col
lection of traditions.)
The Hidaya, translated by C. Hamilton. II edition. London,
1870.
N. B. E. BAILLIE : A Digest of Muhammadan Law. Hanifi
Code. London, 1865.
The same. Imameea Code. London, 1869. The first volume
deals with Sunnite, the second with Shi ite law.
S. KEIJZER : Precis de Jurisprudence Musulmane selon le rite
Chafeite par Abu Chodja ; texte arabe avec traduction et annota
tions. Leyden, 1859. To be used Avith caution.
EDUARD SACHAU : Muhammadanisches Recht nach Schafiitischer
Lehre. Stuttgart & Berlin, 1897. Based largely on al-Bajuri s
commentary to Abu Shuja : covers rather less than half the ma
terial of a corpus of canon law and is the best general introduc
tion to the subject.
IGNAZ GOLDZIHER : Die Zahiriten, ihr Lehrsystem und ihre
Oeschichte. Leipzig, 1884.
IGNAZ GOLDZIHER : Neue Materialien zur Litteratur des Ueber-
lieferungswesen bei den Muhammedanern. ZDMG, I, pp. 465 ff.
Deals with Musnad of Ahmad ibn Hanbal.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 363
IGNAZ GOLDZIHER : Zur Litteratur des Ichtilaf al-madhdhib.
ZDMG, xxxviii, pp. 669 ff. Contains a notice of ash-Sha rani.
IGNAZ GOLDZIHER ; Uber eine Formel in der judischen Respon-
sen-litteratur. ZDMG, liii, pp. 645 ff. On fatwas and ijtihad.
IGNAZ GOLDZIHER : Das Princip des Istishab in muham. Gesetz-
wissenschaft. WZ, i, pp. 228 ff.
EDUARD SACHAU : Muhammedanisches Erbrecht nach der Lehre
der Ibaditischen Araber von Zanzibar und Ostafrika. Sitzungs-
berichte derkon. preuss. Akad., 1894.
EDUARD SACHAU : Zur dltesten Geschichte des muhammedanischen
Rechts. Wien. Akad., 1870.
SNOUCK HURGRONJE : Le droit musulman. Revue de 1 histoire
des religions, xxxvii, pp. 1 ff, and 174 ff.
SNOUCK HURGRONJE : Muhammedanisches Recht nach schafiit-
ischer Lehre von Eduard Sachau; Anzeige, ZDMG, liii, pp. 125 ff.
S. K. KEUN DE HOOGERWOERD : Studien zur Einfiihrung in das
Recht des Islam. Erlangen, 1901. Contains introduction and part
of section on law of marriage. Gives a good but miscellaneous
bibliography and is written from a Persian point of view ; trans
literation is peculiarly eccentric and Arabic scholarship is unsound.
J. WELLHAUSEN : Medina vor dem Islam. Muhammad s Gemein-
deordnung von Medina. In " Skizzen und Vorarbeiten," Viertes
Heft. Berlin, 1889.
HUART : Les Zindiqs en droit musulman. Eleventh Congress
of Orientalists, part iii, pp. 69 ff.
D. B. MACDONALD : The Emancipation of Slaves under Muslim
Law. American Monthly Review of Reviews, March, 1900.
IV
ON MUSLIM THEOLOGY, PHILOSOPHY AND MYSTICISM
THEODOR HAARBRUCKER : Asch-Schahrastani s Religionspar-
teien und Philosophenschulen ubersetzt und erklart. 2 vols. Halle,
1850-51. The Arabic text, without which Haarbriicker s German is
sometimes hardly intelligible, was published by Cureton, London,
1846.
T. J. DE BOER : Geschichte der Philosophic im Islam. Stuttgart,
1901. Unsatisfactory but the best that there is. It is only a sketch
and takes hardly sufficient account of theology and mysticism.
364 APPENDIX II
STANLEY LANE-POOLE : Studies in a Mosque. II edition. Lon
don, 1893. Miscellaneous essays, lightly written but trustworthy.
KREHL : Beitrdge zur Characteristic der Lehre vom Glauben in
Islam. Leipzig, 1877.
G. VON VLOTEN : Les Hachwia et Nabita. Eleventh Congress of
Orientalists, part iii, pp. 99 ff. On early religious sects.
G. VON VLOTEN : Irdja. ZDMG, xiv, pp. 181 ff. On the Mur-
ji ites.
EDUARD SACHAU : Uber de religiosen Anschauungen der ibadit-
ischen Muhammedaner in Oman und Ostafrica. Mitth. a. d. Sem.
f. Orient. Sprachen. Berlin, 1899.
H. STEINER : Die Mu -taziliten oder die Freidenker im Islam.
Leipzig, 1865.
WILHELM SPITTA : Zur Geschichte Abu l-Hasan al-AsWarVs.
Leipzig, 1876. The best as yet on al-Ash ari, but to be used with
caution, especially in the translations of theological texts.
MARTIN SCHREINER : Zur Geschichte des Ashlar itenthums. In
Actes du huitierae Congress International des Orientalistes, I, i,
pp. 77 ff. Leiden, 1891.
M. A. F. MEHREN : Expose de la reforme de Clslamisme com-
mencee au troisieme siecle de VHegire par Abou-l-Hasan Ali el-
Ash^ari et continueepar sonecole. Third International Congress of
Orientalists, vol. ii.
G. FLUGEL: Al-Kindi genannt "der Philosoph der Araber."
Ein Vorbild seiner Zeit und seines Volkes. Leipzig, 1857.
SIR WILLIAM MUIR : The Apology of al-Kindy, written at the
court of al-Mdmun. London, 1882.
E. SELL : The Faith of Islam. London, 1896. II edittion. A
valuable book, but from the point of view of an Indian missionary.
Hence the tone is polemic and the technicalities are Persian rather
than Arabic.
WALTER M. PATTEN : Ahmad ibn Hanbal and the Mihna.
Leyden, 1897. There is a valuable review by Goldziher in ZDMG,
Hi, pp. 155 ff. It traces connection of Hanbalites with Ibn
Taymiya and Wahhabites.
HEINRICH RITTER : Ueber vnsere Kenntniss der Arabischen Phil-
osophie. Gottingen, 1844.
FRIEDRICH DIETERICI : Alfarabi s phitosophische Abhandlungen
herausgegeben. Leiden, 1890. Aus dem arabischen ubersetzt.
Leiden, 1892.
.BIBLIOGRAPHY 365
AL-FARABI : Der Musterstaat. Herausgegeben und Ubersetzt
von Frdr. Dieterici. Leiden, 1900.
G. FLUGEL : Ueber Irihalt und Verfasser der arabisehen Encyclo-
pddie der Ikhwan as-Safa. ZDMG, xiii, pp. 1 ff. See, too, an
excellent article by August Miiller in Ersch und Gruber, ii, 42, pp.
272 ff., and Stanley Lane-Poole in his Studies in a Mosque.
FRIEDRICH DIETERICI : Die Philosophic der Ardber im X.
Jahrhundert n. Chr. aus der Schriften der lauteren Briider her-
ausgegeben. Berlin and Leipzig, 1861-1879.
IGNAZ GOLDZIHER : Materialien zur Entwickelungs-geschichte des
Sufismus. WZ, xiii, pp. 35 ff.
THEODOR NOLDEKE : Sufi. ZDMG, xlviii, pp. 45 ff. On the
derivation and early usage of the name Sufi.
ADELBERT MERX : Idee und Grundlinien einer allgemeinen
Geschichte der Mystik. Heidelberg, 1893.
JOHN P. BROWN : The Derwishes or Oriental Spiritualism.
London, 1868. A valuable but uncritical description of modern
Turkish and Persian Darwishes.
SIR JAMES REDHOUSE : The Mesnevi ofJelal eddin ar-rumi trans
lated into English. Book I. London, 1881. See, too, a transla
tion by Whinfield, London, 1887, and an edition of selected ghazels
from the Diwan with translation and valuable introduction by R. A.
Nicholson, Cambridge University Press, 1898.
E. J. W. GIBB : A History of Ottoman Poetry . Vol. i. London,
1900. A valuable statement of the later Persian and Turkish
mysticism and metaphysic on pp. 13-70.
E. H. PALMER : Oriental Mysticism. Cambridge, 1867.
CARRA DE VAUX : Avicenne. Paris, 1900. Contains an intro
ductory sketch of philosophy and theology up to the time of Ibn
Sina. Algazali. Paris, 1902. A continuation of the first
A. VON KREMER : Uber die philosophischen Gedichte des Abul
Ala Ma^arry. Wien, 1888.
A. VON KREMER : Gedichte des Abu-l-Ala Ma -arri. ZDMG,
xxix, 304 ; xxx, 40 ; xxxi, pp. 471 ff. ; xxxviii, 499 ff.
ABU-L-ALA AL-MA ARRI : Letters Arabic and English, withnotes,
etc., edited by D. S. Margoliouth. Oxford, 1898. See, too, papers
by R. A. Nicholson in JRAS, October, 1900, ff. ; and by Mar
goliouth, for April, 1902.
E. FITZGERALD : The Ruba^iyat of Omar Khayyam. With a
commentary by H. M. Batson and a biographical Introduction by
366 APPENDIX II
E. D. Ross. New York, 1900. The biography by Ross is the only
at all adequate treatment of the life and times of Urnar which yet
exists. Of the Ruba iyat themselves there are several adequate
translations, e.g. by Whinfield, Payne and Mrs. Cadell.
MARTIN SCHREINER : Zur Geschichte der Polemik zwischen Juden
und Muhammedanern. ZDMG, xlii, pp. 591 ff. Deals with Ibn
Hazm and Fakhr ad-Din ar-Razi.
MARTIN SCHREINER : Beitrdge zur Geschichte der theologischen
Bewegungen in Islam. ZDMG, lii, pp 463 ff. ; 513 ff. ; liii, pp.
51 ff. A most valuable collection of materials with considerable
gaps and imperfect digestion.
D. B. MACDONALD : The Life ofal-Ghazzali. In the Journal of
the American Oriental Society, vol. xx, pp. 71-132.
D. B. MACDONALD : Emotional Religion in Islam as affected by
Music and Singing. Being a translation of a book of the Ihya of
al-Ghazzali. In JRAS for April and October, 1901, and January,
1902.
MIGUEL ASIN PALACIOS : Algazel, dogmatica, moral, ascetica.
Zaragoza, 1901.
C. BARBIER DE METNARD : Traduction nouvelle du Traite de
Ghazzali, intitule Le Preservatif de 1 Erreur. In JA, vii, 9, pp.
5ff.
T. J. DE BOER : Die Widerspriiche der Philosophic nach al-
Ghazzali und ihr Ausgleich durch Ibn Roshd. Strassburg, 1894.
A translation of al-Ghazzali s Tahafut has been begun by Carra
de Vaux in Le Museon, xxviii, p. 143 (June, 1899).
IGNAZ GOLDZIHER : Materialien zur Kenntniss der Almohaden-
bewegung in Nordafrika. ZDMG, xli, pp. 30 ff.
IGNAZ GOLDZIHER : Die Bekenntnissformeln der Almohaden.
ZDMG, xliv, pp. 168 ff.
ROBERT FLINT : Historical Philosophy in France and French
Belgium and Switzerland. New York, 1894. Contains an excel
lent estimate of Ibn Khaldun as a philosophical historian.
A. VON KREMER : Ibn Chaldun und seine Culturgeschichte der
islamischen Reiche. Wien, 1879.
ERNEST RENAN : Averroes et VAverroismt. Ill edition. Paris,
1861. Reviewed by Dozy in JA, 5, ii, pp. 93 ff. This review con
tains a curious description of a Parliament of Religions at Baghdad
about A.D. 1000.
Philosophic und Theologie von Averroes. Aus dem Aralischen
BIBLIOGRAPHY 367
iibersetztvon M. J. Mutter. Miinchen, 1875. The Arabic text was
published by Miiller in 1859.
LEON GAUTHIER : Ib n Thofail-Hayy ben Yaqdhan, roman philo-
sophique. Texte arabe . . . et traduction fran$aise. Alger,
1900. There is an earlier edition of Ibn Tufayl s romance by the
younger Pocock with a Latin version. Oxford, 1671.
M. A. F. MEHREN : Correspondence du Philosophe Soufi Ibn
Sab -in Abd oul-Haqq avec V Empereur Frederic II. de Ifohen-
staufen. In JA, yii, 14, pp. 341 ff.
S. GUYARD : Abd ar-Razzaq et son traite de la Predestination
et du libre arbitre. In JA, vii, 1, pp. 125 ff.
A. DE KREMER : Notice sur Sha rany. In JA, vi, 11, pp. 253 ff.
G. FLUGEL : Scha^rani und sein Werk uber die muhammadan-
ische Glaubenslehre. ZDMG, xx, p. 1 ff.
IGNAZ GOLDZIHER : Beitrage zur Litteraturgeschichte der Shi a.
Wien, 1874.
JAMES L. MERRICK : The Life and Religion of Mohammed, as
contained in the Sheeah Traditions of the Hyat-ul-Kuloob. Bos
ton, 1850.
J. B. RULING: Beitrage zur Eschatologie des Islam. Leipzig,
1895.
L. GAUTHIER : Ad-dourra al-fakhira ; la perle precieuse de Gha-
zali. Geneve, 1878. In Arabic and French; a valuable account
of Muslim eschatology.
M. WOLFF : Muhammedanische Eschatologie. Leipzig, 1872.
In Arabic and German ; an account of popular Muslim eschatology.
DEPONT ET CAPPOLANI : Les Confreries religieuses Musulmanes.
Alger, 1897.
SNOUCK HURGRONJE : Les Confreries religieuses, la Mecque et le
Panislamisme, in Revue de 1 histoire des religions, xliv, pp. 262 ff .
APPENDIX III
For typographical reasons the smooth guttural Ha, the palatals Sad, Dad,
Ta, Za, and the long vowels are indicated by italic. The same system is fol
lowed in the index.
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE
A.H.
11 M.d. ; Abw Bakr Kh.
13 UmarKh.
14 Battle of al-Qadisiya ; fall of
Jerusalem ; al-Basra found
ed ; fall of Damascus.
17 Al-Kwfa founded ; Syria and
Mesopotamia conquered.
20 Conquest of Egypt.
21 Battle of Nahawand; Persia
conquered.
23 UthmanKh.
30 Final redaction of the Qur an.
35 Ali Kh.
3(5 Battle of Carmel.
40 Ali d.
41 MuWiyaL Kh. ; Herat.
49 Al-#asan d.
56 Samarqand.
60 Schism of Ibad*ites from Khari-
jites.
61 Karbala &lt;fc d. of al-#uaayn.
73 Storm of Mecca &lt;fe d. of Abd
Allah b. az-Zubayr.
74 Carthage.
80 Ma bad executed.
81 M. b. al-#anafi ya d.
93 Toledo.
99-101 Umar II. Kh.
110 #asan al-Basri d.
114 Charles the Hammer at Tours
(A.D. 732).
A.H.
121 Zayd b. Zayn al- ^bidin d.
124 Az-Zuhri d.
127-132 Marwan II. Kh.
130 Jahm b. tfafwan killed ?
131 Wasil b. Ata d.
132 Fall of Umayyads ; as-SaffaA
first Abbasid Kh.
134 First Ibarfite Imam.
135 Rabi a d.
136-158 Al-Man.swr Kh.
138-422 Umayyads of Cordova.
140 Ibn al-Muqaffa killed.
143 Halley s comet.
144 Amr b. Ubayd d. ?
145 Baghdad founded ; A ishad.
of Ja far a.s-adiq d.
147 Homage to al-Mahdi as suc
cessor in Kh.
148 Ja far as-6 adiq d.
150 Abw #kmfa d. ; trace of Sufi
monastery in Damascus.
157 Al-Awza i d.
158-169 Al-Mahdi Kh. ; John of
Damascus d.?
161 Sufyan ath-Thawri d. ; Ibra
him b. Adham d.
165 Da ?*d b. Nusayr d.
167 Bashshar b. Burd killed.
170-193 Harwn ar-Rashid Kh.
172-375 Idrisids.
179 Malik b. Anas d.
368
A.H. 182-408
369
A.H.
183 The Qacli Abu Ywsuf d.
187 Fall of Barmecides ; al-Fu-
fZayl b. lyad d.
189 M. b. al-#asan d.
198-218 Al-Ma mwn Kh.
200 Ma r?*f of al-Karkh d. ; trace
of Sui. i monastery inKhura-
san.
204 Ash-Shafi i d. .
208 Abu Ubayda d. ; the Lady
Nafisa d.
211 Theodorus Abucara d.
212 Decree that the Qur an is
created.
213 Thumama b. Ashras d.
215 Abw Sulaynmn of Damascus
d.; 2nd decree.
218-234 The Mi7ma ; Al-Mu tasim
Kh.
220 Ma mar b. Abbad.
223 FaZima of Naysabwr d.
226 Abu Hudhayl M. al- Allaf d.
227 Bishr al-//afi d. ; al-Wathiq
Kh.
231 An-N&zzam d.
233 Al-Mutawakkil Kh.
234 Decree that Qur an is un
created ; Scotus Erigena
transl. pseudo-Dionysius,
A.D. 850.
240 Ibn Abi Duwad d.
241 Afanad b. Hanbal d.
243 Al-#arith al-Mu/iasibi d.
245 Dhw-n-Nwn d. ; al-Karabisi
d.
250-316 Alids of Zaydite branch
in north Persia.
255 Al-Jahiz d.
256 Ibn Karram d.
257 Al-Bukhari d. ; Sari as-Saqatf
d.
260 Al-Kindi d.? M. b. al-lTasan
al-Muntazar vanished.
A.H.
261 Muslim d. ; Abw Yazid al-
270 Da wd a^-Zahiri d.
273 Ibn Maja d.
275 Abu Da ?/d as-Sijistani d.
277 Qarma^ians hold fortress in
Arab Iraq.
279 At-Tirmidhi d.
280 Zaydite Imams at as-Sa da
and San a.
289 Ubayd Allah al-Mahdi in
North Africa.
295-320 Al-Muqtadir Abbasid
Kh.
297 First Faiimid Kh. ; al-Junayd
d.
300 Return of al- Ash art.
303 An-Nasa i d. ; Al-Jubba i d.
309 Al-Uallaj executed.
317 Umayyads of Cordova take
title of Commander of the
Faithful ; Qarma^ians in
Mecca.
320-447 Buwayhids ; al-Ash ari
d.?
322 Ibn ash-Shalmagham.
331 At-T&hawi d.
333 Al-Matarrdi d.
333-356 Sayf ad-Dawla.
334 Buwayhids in Baghdad ; ash-
Shibli d.
339 Return of Black Stone by
Qarmaiians ; al-Farabi d.
356 Faiimids conquer Egypt ;
Cairo founded.
360 Ikhwan as-*Safa fl.
362 Ibn Hani d.
381-422 Al-Qadir Kh.
386 Abw Talib al-Makki d.
388-421 Ma/miwd of Ghazna.
403 Al-Baqilani d.
408 Persecution of Mu tazilites
under al-Qadir.
370
APPENDIX III
411 Al-Hakim Fartmid Kh. van
ished ; Firdawsi d.
428 Ibn Sina d.
434 Abu Dharr d.
440 Al-Benmi d.
447 ^ughril Beg, the Saljuq, in
Baghdad.
449 Abw-l- Ala al-Ma arri d.
450 Persecution of Ash arites.
455 Alp-Arslan ; Nizam al-Mulk
Wazir ; end of persecution
of Ash arites.
456 Ibn H&zm az-Zahiri d.
465 Al-Qushayri d.
478 Imam al-//aramayn d.
481 Nasir b. Khusraw d.
483 ff&s&n b. &s-Saibbah seizes
Alamwt.
485 Nkam al-Mulk assass.
488 Al-Ghazzalt leaves Baghdad.
505 Al-Ghazzali d.
515 Umar al-Khayyam d.
516 Al-Baghawi d.
524 Ibn Tmnart al-Mahdi d.
534-558 Abd al-Mu min.
524-667 The MuwaAAids.
533 Abw Bakr b. Bajja d.
537 Abu 7/afs an-Nasafi d.
538 Az-Zamakhshari d.
540 Yehuda Halevid. A. D. 1145.
546 Abu Bakr b. al- Arabi d.
548 Ash-Shahrastani d.
558 Abd al-Mu min the Mu-
waA/ad d.
558 Adi al-Hakkart d.
558-580 Abw Ya qwb the Mu-
561 Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani,
founder of order of dar-
wishes, d.
567 Conquest of Egypt by Saladin
and end of Faftmids.
576 Order of Rif a ites founded.
A.H.
580 Abw Ya qwb d.
580-596 Abw Ywsuf al-Manawr.
581 Ibn Tnf ayl d.
587 As-Suhrawardi executed.
589 Saladin d.
590 AbwShuja d.?
595 Ibn Rushd d.; Abw Ysuf
al-Man-wr the Muwa^id d.
601 Maimonidesd. A.D. 1204.
606 Fakhr ad-Din ar-Razi d.
620 Abw-1-JTajjaj b. Tumlus d. ;
Fakhr ad-Din b. Asakir
d. ; St. Francis of Assisi d.
=A.D. 1226.
625-941 ^afsids at Tunis.
630-640 ^r-Rashid the MuwaA-
Aid.
632 Umar b. al-Fario*.
638 Ibn Arabi d.
648 Frederick II. d.=A.D. 1250.
654 End of Assassins by Mon
gols ; Ash-ShadhiK, found
er of order of darwishes, d.
667 Ibn Sab in d.; end of MuwaA-
Aids.
672 Jalal ad-Din ar-Rwrni d.
675 AAmad al-Badawi, founder of
order of darwishes, d.
681 Ibn Khallikan d.
685 Al-Baydawi d.
693,698-708, 709-741 MuAammad
An-Nosir, Mamlwk Sultan,
reg.
719 An-Nasral-Manbijid.?
724 Ibn Rushd is still studied at
Almeria.
728 IbnTaynuyad.; MeisterEck-
hart d.=A.D. 1328.
730 Abd ar-Razzaq d.
756 Al- Jjid.; Heinrich Suso d.
791 At-Taftazani d.; an-Naqsh-
bandi, founder of order of
darwishes, d.
A.H. 808-1275
371
808 Ibn Khaldwn d.
857 Capture of Constantinople
by Ottomans and office of
Shaykh al-Islam created=
A.D. 1453. Thomas a Kern-
pis d.-= A. D. 1471.
895 M. b. Ywsuf as-Saimsi d.
907 Accession of /Safawids.
922 Conquest of Egypt by Otto
man Turks.
945 Death of al-Mutawakkil, last
&lt;Abbsid.
951 Beginning of Sharifs of Mo
rocco.
A.H.
973 Ash-Sha rani d.
1201 &lt;Abd al-Wahhab d. = A.D.
1787.
1205 Sayyid Murtada d.; al-Fu-
dali fl. circ. 1220.
1252 Foundation of Brotherhood
of as-Sanwsi=A.D. 1837.
1260 Ibrahim al-Bajwri d. ; De
cree of Porte that apostate
Muslims should not be put
to death.
1275 Death of founder of Broth
erhood of as-Sanwsi=-A.D.
1859.
INDEX OF NAMES AND AEABIC WOKDS
Abadi, 300
Al- Abbas, 10, 32
Abbasids, 10, 32, 34, 39, 45, 50,
51, 53, 54, 56, 57, 91, 92-94, 97,
98, 132-135, 153, 154, 167, 169,
174
Abd, 294
Abd Allah, father of Muhammad,
350, f.
Abd Allah ibn az-Zubayr, 23, 25
Abd Allah ibn Maymwn, 40, 42-44
l Abd Allah ibn Umar, 298
Abd al-Mu min, 248, 252
Abd al-Muttalib, 351
Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani, 267
Abd ar-Raftman, the Umayyad,
33
Abd ar-Razzaq, 271, f.
Abid, 173, 174
Abida, 174
Abkam, 340
Abraham, also Ibrahim, 42, 226,
345
Abw Abd Allah ibn Karram ; see
Ibn Karram
Abw-l- Ala al-Ma arri, 199
Abw Bakr, 1st Kh., 13-16, 23, 24,
36, 56, 71, 165, 200, 250, 268,
297, 307, 313, 346
Abw Da wd as-Sijistani, 81
Abw Dharr, 207
Abw-1-flajjaj ibn Tumlus, 260
Ab?&lt; iTanifa, 94-102, 106, 121, 127,
193, 309
Abw Hashim, 159, f.
Abw Hudhayl, 136-139, 159, 248
Abw Sahl, 325
Abw Shuja al-Ispahani, 351
Abw Sufyan, 22
Abw Sulayman of Damascus, 175
Abw Talib, 10
Abw Talib al-Makki, 176, f.
Abw Ubayda, 150
Abu Ya qwb ibn Abd al-Mu min,
252-255
Abw Y?/suf , the Qadi, 96-99
Abw Ywsuf al-Manswr, 252, 255
Active Intellect, 236, 250-253, 256,
265
Mda, 113
Adad, 326
Adam, 42, 43, 171, 232, 312, 332,
346
Adam, 316
Adi al-Hakkari, 267
Adil, 356
Adi, 291
Africa, 59
Africa, East, 24, 26
Africa, North, 20, 35, 45, 46, 62,
243
Abl al-ahwa, 122, 299
Ahl at-tawAid wal- adl, 136
A hi kitab, 24
A/tmad al-Badawi, 267, 269
A7miad al-Malawi, 331
A/imad ar-Rifa a, 267
AAmad ibn Abd Allah ibn May-
mwn, 44
AAmad ibn Abi Duwad, 156
373
374 INDEX OF NAMES AND ARABIC WORDS
A/rniad ibn tfanbal, 79, 103, 110,
157, 158, 172, 175, 176, 187, 274,
277,293
A isha, wife of Muhammad, 10,
13,21
A isha, daughter of Ja far as-
Sadiq, 173
Ajal, 298, 311
Al-Ajhwri, 346
Ajz, 317, 339
Al-Akh*al, 89
.Alam al-jabarwt, 234
^tlam al-malakwt, 234, 235
Alam al-mulk, 234
Alanmt, 49, 169, 224
Alastu bi-rabbikum, 171
Aleppo, 162
Alexandria, 241
Algeria, 24, 26, 62
Alida, 18, 32-35, 37, 51, 155, 157,
166, 187
4 Ali ibn Abi Talib, 18-31, 36, 37,
44, 45, 88, 121, 155, 182, 249,
259, 275, 297, 307, 313, 314, 346
Alim, 337 ; cf. ulama
Allah, 127, 161, 321, 327
Almeria, 260
Alp Arslan, 213
Alphonso the Wise, 233
Al- Alqami, 346
A ma, 340
Ama, 340
Amal, 294, 296, 312
Amana, 347
Amr ibn Ubayd, 129
Amina, mother of Muhammad, 351
Anima Mundi, 232
Ansar, 9, 13, 18
Aqida, 316
Aqtqa, 356
Aql, 120, 136, 148, 157, 214, 269,
272, 292, 308, 316
Al- aql al-fa al ; see Active Intel
lect
Arabs, 8, 14, 17, 24, 40, 44-46, 50,
51, 60, 67, 68, 74, 124, 125, 127,
133, 134, 150, 157, 243, 305
Arabia, 15, 23, 25, 36, 37, 131
Arabia, South, 23, 36, 37, 45, 59
Arab Iraq ; see al- lraq
Arad, 159, 309, 320
ArAamu-r-raAiimn, 210
Aristotelians, Aristotelianism, 134,
140, 144, 161-163, 168, 196, 198,
201., 202, 286
Aristotle, 134, 138, 140, 144, 161-
164, 198, 221, 232, 236, 248,
253, 255, 256, 260, 264
Arsh, 301
Asal, 253, 254
Asamm, 340
Al-asharatu-1-mubashshara, 268,
297, 314
Al-Ash ari, 187-190, 192, 193, 200,
208, 214, 217, 218, 220, 226, 229,
230, 293, 308, 319, 341
Ash^arites, 191, 201, 207-213, 241-
247, 272, 273, 276, 280, 291,
292, 338
, day of, 28
Asl, 107, 109
AslaA, 190, 292, 311; see, too,
salah
Al-asma al-/msna, 210, 280, 321,
341
Assassins, 27, 49, 53, 59, 169, 170,
196 ; see, too, Isma ilians,
Baiinites, Ta limites
Ata ibn Yassar, 128
Athos, Mount, 178
Augustine, 132, 215, 216
Avenpace, 250 ; see, too, Ibn Bajja
Averroes, Averroism, 251 ; see,
too, Ibn Rushd
AvJcenna, 197 ; see, too, Ibn Sina
Awlad llwan, 268
AwwaKyat, 260
Al-Awza i, 98
INDEX OF NAMES AND ARABIC WORDS 375
Ayn, 191, 309, 319, 341
Azali, 291, 300, 309, 322, 343
Babism, 5
Badaha, 308
Badakhshan, 170
Badan, 141
Badawite darwishes, 267
Al-Baghawi, 81, 207
Baghdad, 5, 50-53, 56, 111, 133,
159, 162, 166-168, 175, 184, 185,
190, 194, 195, 207, 213, 217,
220, 226, 267
Baghdad, Pashalik of, 60
Bakam, 340
Balada, 347
Balkh, 174
Baqa, 323
Al-Baqilam, 200, 201, 207
Barmak, Barmecides, 50
Basar, 294, 333
Bashshar ibn Burd, 150
Basir, 337
Al-Basra, 18, 23, 25, 83, 150, 159,
167, 174, 187, 188
Ba th, 296, 311, 329
Ba^in, 314
Bartnites, 42, 196
Bate, 42
Bay , 353
Al-Bayo-awi, 195, 241
Al-Bayjwri, 315
Baytu-l- izza, 335
Bedawis, 62
Berbers, 45, 243, 244, 248, 249
Al-Berwni, 170, 197
Beyrout, 84
Bid a, 74, 78, 148, 186, 297, 299,
307
Bila kayfa wala tashbih, 147, 171,
191, 208, 294, 344 ; cf. kayfa
Bil-fi l ; see Fi l
Bishr al-Hafi, 175, 176
Bishr al-Marisi, 155
Bishr ibn al-Mu tamir, 142, 143,
151, 152
Al-Bistami, A\&gt;u Yazid, 183, 188,
225,268
Brotherhood of as-Sanwsi, 61, ff.
Buddhists, 134
Al-Bukhari, 79, 80, 147, 148
Burgundy, 83
Burhan, 259, 260
Buwayhids, 51, 52, 167, 194, 195,
197, 208
Caesarea, 84
Cairo, 49, 166, 173, 195, 241, 244,
277
Camel, Battle of the, 21
Carthage, 82, 243
Charles the Hammer, 83
Chinese Muslims, 59
Christians, Christianity, 24, 47, 48,
125, 130-134, 137, 144, 147, 151,
181, 194
Companions ; see -Sahibs
Code Napoleon, 114
Constantine in Algeria, 45
Constantinople, 54, 113
Crusaders, 49
Ad-Dajjal, 298, 315
DaKl, 109, 315
Daman, 354
Damascus, 14, 82, 88, 131, 175, 177
Dar al-#arb, 55
Dar al-Islam, 55
Darwri, 308
Darwishes, 5, 61, 179, 182, 183, 203,
244, 266, 268
Da wd az-Zahiri, 103, 108-110
Da wd ibn Nusayr, 174
Dauphine , Le, 83
Dawr, 323
Dhikrs, 174, 178, 179
Dhuhwl, 340
Dhw-1-faqar, 20
376 INDEX OF NAMES AND ARABIC WORDS
Dlm-1-Kifl, 346
Dhw-n-Nwn, 176
Dlm-n-Nwrayn, 313
Din, 293, 297, 298, 305, 307
Diya, 355
Diyana, 293
Druses, 27, 48, 59, 170
Eckart, the mystic, 180
Edict of the Praetor, 87
Egypt, Egyptians, 14, 21, 23, 30,
45-49, 53, 62, 82, 187, 244, 277,
287
Emessa, 163
Erigena, Scotus, 182
Euchites, 178
Euclid, 134
Euphrates, 133
Fakhr ad-Din ar-Razi, 241
Fakhr ad- Din ibn Asakir, 273
Fan a, 338
Faqih, f uqaha, 73, 85, 270
Faqirs, 268
Al-Fqrobi, 162-164, 165, 167, 169,
181, 196, 215, 221, 236, 250
Faragh, 317
Fard, 73
Farirfa, 354
Al-Farwq, 313
FaZana, 347
Fatima., daughter of Muhammad,
20, 30, 36, 346, 347
Fatima of Naysabwr, 173
Fartmids, 27, 36, 45, 47, 49, 165-
167, 169, 173, 184, 197, 224, 241,
244,251
Fatwa, 115, 184, 276, 277
Fay , 356
Bil-fi l, 328
Fi ma^all ; see maAall
Fiqh, 77, 87, 116, 132, 208, 209, 245,
252, 261, 270, 279, 282; cf.
faqih
Firdawsi, 170
St. Francis of Assisi, 180
Frederick II., the Hohenstaufen,
263
Friday, 35, 51, 235, 298, 313
Al-Fudali, 191, 315
Al-Fudayl ibn lyad, 174, 175
Fnstat, 83
Galen, 134
Ghafala, 340
Al-Gham, 327
Ghamma, 356
Ghasb, 354
Al-Ghayb, 139, 281, 314
Al-Ghazzali, 139, 165, 176, 183, 195,
199, 207, 215-241, 245-249, 253,
257, 260-264, 267, 270, 284-286,
300, 309
Ghiba, 349
Ghusl, 352
Gondeshapwr, 134
Greek monks, 178
Greek philosophy, science, etc.,
133, 138, 140, 144, 159, 161, 162
.flabib, 175
J?add, 314, 355
.fladith, 75, 77, 78, 87, 94, 121, 190,
209, 261, 270
.Sadith, 320, 322, 328, 332
Jfadith an-nafs, 273, 336, 350
//adramawt, 60
jffaf&ids, 265
ffa il, 60
#ajar as-safih, 354
Ha]], 275, 278, 292, 353
Al-77ajjaj, 209, 298
Al-Jfakim Bi amrillah, 47, 48
Al-#akam ibn abi-l- ^s, 17
Hal, 160, 176, 227, 310, 319, 322,
337
Hal nafsi, 319
H&lal, 298
INDEX OF NAMES AND ARABIC WOKDS 377
Al-.flallaj, 183-185, 298
Halley s comet, 34
Hamdanids, 162, 165
Hamilton, Sir William, 237
//anbalites, 115, 121, 158, 167, 190,
191, 200, 207, 208, 212-214, 237,
273, 274, 278
JZanif, 125
.ffanifites, 115
7/aqiqa, 328, 329 ,
#aqq, 356
7/aram, 73, 298, 311
Al-#araman, 56, 213
Al-//arith al-Muftasibi, 175, 177,
187, 225
Harran, 133, 134
Harwn ar-Rashid, 50, 97, 98, 144,
153, 155, 175
#asad, 349
Al-TTasan, 20, 27, 28, 35
Al-^asan al-Basri, 128, 129, 130,
172, 173
.#asan ibn as-Safobah, 224
Hashim, 10, 17, 32, 313, 351
, 354
, 249, 296, 306, 311, 349
Hayah, 332
7/ayy, 337
Al-5ayy, 211
J7ayy ibn Yaqzan, 253, 254
Hebron, 226
Hegel, 143, 233
Herat, 82, 207
Hesychasts, 178
Hiba, 354
ffidana,, 355
Hidden Imam, 31, 37, 41, 56, 116;
cf. Imam, Imamites
Hierotheos, 181
Al--5"ijaz, 212
Hippocrates, 134
Hwd, 346
Hnduth, 320, 338; cf. Tiadith,
muAdath
JZukm, 292
Hwlag?^, 49, 53
IMul, 228
Hume, 229, 230
Al-JZusayn, 20, 28
Huwa-1-Aaqq, 203
I ara, 354
Ibadites, 5, 26, 54, 115, 117, 126
Ibn Abd al-Wahhab ; see MuAam,
mad ibn Abd al-Wahhab
Ibn Abi Awja, 80
Ibn al- Arabi, 316, 322, 323, 328
Ibn Arab*, 241, 261, 264, 271, 277,
280
Ibn ash-Shalmagham, 185
Ibn Bajja, 250, 252, 255, 257
Ibn Hani, 170
Ibn #azm, 209-212, 245-248, 261,
275, 280
Ibn Ibao-, Abd Allah, 25, 26, 116
Ibn Karram, 170, ff.
Ibn Khaldwn, 50, 81, 242, f.
Ibn Khallikan, 185
Ibn Maja, 81
Ibn al-Muqaffa , 150
Ibn Rushd, 161, 163, 195, 206, 215,
236, 248, 252, 255, 256-261, 264-
286
IbnSab m,&lt;Abdal-5aqq, 263,264,
267, 277
Ibn_Sma, 163, 171, 197, 221, 228,
2367241, 250, 257
Ibn Tayimya, 270-278, 283-285
Ibn Tufayl, 252-256, 261
Ibn Twmart, 207, 245-248, 252, 275
Ibrahim ibn Adham, 174, 268
Al-idafatu-l- amm lil-khass, 337
Al-ia"afatu-l-bayamya, 337
Idda, 355
Idris, 346
Idrts ibn Abd Allah, 35
Idrisids, 84, 102
lhata., 332
378 INDEX OF NAMES AND ARABIC WORDS
293
j ila ma/iall, 339
Ihya, 338
IAya of al-Ghazzali, 285, 300
Ihya al-mawat, 354
Ijara, 354
I jaz, 151
Al- /ji, 241, 269
Ijma , 57, 58, 72, 94, 101, 105, 209,
292, 328, 351
Ijmali, 316
Ikhtilaf, 116
Ikhtiyar, 192, 310, 339, 345
Ikhwan w-safa, 167, 169, 194, 196,
199
Iktisab, 280; cf. kasb
Iktisabi, 309
Ha, 355
Uhad, 314
Ilham, 281, 309
Iljam al- awamm an ilm al-kalam
of al-Ghazzali, 260
Ilia, 107, 319, 337 ; cf. ta Kl
Ilm, 201, 294, 332
Ilwan, the Shaykh, 268
Imam, 26, 29, 31, 36-38, 41-43, 46,
54, 57, 142, 155, 165, 167, 188,
197, 212, 224, 286, 292, 293, 297-
299, 311, 313, 318, 350
Imam al-#aramayn, 212, 218, 217,
230, 317
Imamites, 37, 57, 59, 116, 126, 142,
247
7man, 126, 127, 292-296, 311, 312&gt;
318, 350
Imata, 338
Imdadat, 330
ImtiAan, 148; cf. mi Ana
India, 51, 55, 56, 59, 61
India, Emperor of, 55
Indian Mu tazilism, 286
Injil, 304
In aha Allah, 272
Iqrar, 312, 354
Irada, 330
Al- Iraq, 209
Iraq, Arab, 44
Irda, 355
Irja, 292 ; cf. Murji ites
/sa ; see Jesus
Islam, 7, 13-15, 19-27, 37, 40-48,
52-55, 58, 59, 68, 71-74, 118-
120, 124, 130, 136, 141, 142,
149, 151-154, 158-161, 167, 173,
176, 177, 180-183, 186, 190, 191,
206, 212-215, 218, 226, 228, 230,
231, 233, 235, 238-244, 248, 261,
262, 270, 278, 282-284, 292, 296,
312
Isma, 247, 292, 314, 347
Isma il, 41, 42, 43
Isma ilians, 42, 44, 57, 59, 169, 170,
196
Isnad, 75, 78, 79
Ispahan, 195
Istawa, Istiwa, 186, 294, 301
Istidlali, 308
IstiAsan, 87, 94, 96
IstislaA, 87, 100, 101
Istita a, 310
Istiwa ; see Istawa
I tazala anna, 130
Ithna Ashariya, 38
I tibar, 201, 341
I tibar ikhtira i, 342
I tibar intiza i, 343
I tidal, 221
I tikaf, 353
Itq, 357
IttiAad, 228, 277
Ja ala, 354
Jabarites, 292, 344
Jabr, 291, 344
Jacob, 350
Jadliya, 259
Ja far as-Sadiq, 42, ITS
Al-Jafr, 249
INDEX OF NAMES AND ARABIC WORDS 379
Jahannam, 306
Al-Jahiliya, the Barbarism, cr the
Ignorance, 8, 74, 77, 173
Al-Jahiz, 160, 161
Jahl, 340
Jahm ibn Saf wan, 126, 138, 146, 150
Jahmites, 294, 299
Ja iz, 73, 316, 348
Jalal ad-Din ar-Rwmi, 267
Jami , 80
Jarabitb, 62
Jawhar, 159, 309
Jawhar ruhani, 231
Jerusalem, 14, 40, 42, 146, 226
Jesus, laa, 42, 146, 315, 345
Jews, 24, 47, 68, 70, 133, 134, 144,
194
Jibril, 292, 293, 335, 336
Jihad, 55, 63, 246, 356
Jinaya, 355
Jinn, Jinm, Jann, 76, 281, 283, 286,
299, 304, 305, 324
Jirm, 317, 320
Jism, 143, 309
Jizya, 15, 356
John of Damascus, 89, 131, 132,
137, 146
Al-Jubba% 159, 160, 172, 188-190
Al-Junayd, 176, 177, 183, 187, 225,
282
Jurisprudentes, 85, 86
Juththa, 334
Al-Juwayni ; see Imam al-^Tara-
mayn
Ka ba, 149, 268, 278
Kabira, 127, 296, 311, 349
Kafala, 354
Kafir, 295, 316, 328, 350 ; cf. kufr,
takfir
" Kalila and Dimna," 150
Kahin, 314
Kalam, 147, 149, 151, 157, 175, 186,
188, 193, 200, 206, 208, 214, 216,
241, 242, 245, 276, 278, 286, 294,
309, 315, 335
Kalam Allah, 146
Kalam nafst, Aadith fi-n-naf s, 273,
336
Kalimata-sh-shahada, 300
Al-kalimatan, 30
Kallima-llahu Mwsa taklima, 149
Kamm mu.nfa.sil, 325
Kamm muttasil, 325
Kant, 191, 200, 201
Al-Karabisi, 187
Karaha, 339
Karama, 174, 213, 228, 230, 274, 281,
282, 313
Karbala, 28
Karramites, 170, 191, 195, 291, 292
Kasb, 179, 192, 292 ; cf. iktisab
Kashf, 120, 172, 179, 215, 269
Kashshaf of az-Zamakhshan, 195
Kawn, 309 ; cf. takwin
Kawn ajiz, 340
Kawn jahil, 340
Kawn karih, 340
Kawn mayyit, 340
Kawn murid, 337
Kawn qadir, 336
Al-Kawthar, 306, 349
Kayfa, 297
Kayfiya, 309, 334
Kempis, Thomas a, 177, 180
Khabar, 308
Khadija, 347
Al-Khadir, 281, 283
Khalifa, Khalifate, 13-28, 32-38,
45, 47, 51-58, 297, 313 ; cf . al-
Khulafa
Khalq, 338
Khanqah, 229, 266
Kharaj, 15
Kharas, 340, 341
Kharijites, 23-27, 32, 40, 44, 57, 59,
123-126, 131, 172, 212, 292, 294,
296
380 INDEX OF NAMES AND ARABIC WORDS
Khaterat, 331
Khitobiya, 259
Khiiba, 355
Khiyana, 347
Khuffs, 298, 314, 347, 352, 355
KhuP, 355
Al-Khulaf a-ar-rashidwn, 22, 87, 99,
105, 114
Khurasan, 171, 174, 177
KhuZba, 56
Khuzistan, 25, 134
Kibr, 349
Kidhb, 347
Al-Kindi, 155, 161, 187
Kitaba, 357
Kitman, 347
Kubra of as-Sanwsi, 316
Al-Kwfa, 18, 23, 28, 83
Kufr, 157, 296, 311, 332, 349 ; cf.
takfir, kafir
Labid, 149
Lafz, 147, 335
Laqab, 347
Laqtt, 354
La shay , 328
Al-law^ al-maMwz, 335
Laylatu-1-qadr, 335
Lebanon, 48
Leibnitz, 192, 200, 203
Li an, 355
Logos, 146-148, 151
Lucretius, 200
Luqte, 354
Luff, 292
Ma bad al-JuAani, 128
Al-Madina, 7, 8, 18, 35, 56, 67, 69-
71, 72, 82, 87, 88, 99, 101, 102,
165, 213, 216, 226, 278, 284, 346
Madrasa, 229
Ma dwm, 159, 314, 319; cf. adam
Mafati/i al-ghayb of ar-Razi, 241
Magians, 144
Al-Maghrib, 243
Maftall, 317, 325
Mahall (fi), 137
Al-Mahdi, 27, 34, 45, 62, 114, 244-
249
Al-Mahdi, the Abbasid Khalifa,
35,134
Al-Mahdiya, 165, 244
Mahiya, 309
MaAnmd of Ghazna, 170, 195, 197
Mahr, 355
Maimonides, 237
Maine, Sir Henry, 65, 85, 114
Majazi, 329
Majwj, 315
Makhlwqat, 324
Makrwh, 73, 347
Malay Archipelago, 62
Malik ibn Anas, 35, 78, 99-103,
106, 147, 186, 245, 346
Malikites, 115
Ma mar ibn Abbad, 143
Mamlwks, 53, 54, 275
Al-Ma mwn, 50, 110, 140, 144, 154-
159, 162, 166, 277
Mandwb, 73, 347
Manichaeans, 133, 134
Mansel, H. L., 237
Al-Manswr, Abbasid Kh., 33, 34,
50, 134, 153, 154
Maqama, 176
Al-Maqasid, 346
Maqb?^at, 259
Mar an, 314
Ma rifa, 201, 350
Mariya the Copt, 347
Ma rwf of al-Karkh, 175
Marwan II., 32
Marwan ibn al-J?akam, 17
Masabi/i as-sunna of al-Baghawi,
81
MasA, 298, 314
Mashhttrat, 259
Mashya, 294
INDEX OF NAMES AND ARABIC WORDS 381
MaslaAa, 101
Masyaf, 49
Al-Mataridi, 187, 193, 207, 308
Mataridites, 200, 207, 337, 338
Matn, 75, 78
Mawaqif of al /ji, 241
Mawjwb, 347 ; cf. wajib
Mawjwd, 159, 191, 314, 319; cf.
wujwd
Mawlawite darwishes, 267
Mawqif, 296, 349
Mawsil, 267
Mawt, 340
Maymwn, 40
Maznwnat, 259
Mecca, 9, 17, 23, 25, 32, 46, 56, 62,
68, 174, 184, 213, 217, 226, 265,
285, 296, 346
Merv, 217
Mesnevi, The, 267
Mesopotamia, 23, 44, 82, 131, 187
Mi/ma, 156, 157
Minister of Justice, 114
Mi raj, 298, 312
Mongols, 49, 52, 53, 169
Monophysites, 181
Morocco, 35, 62
Moses, 42, 149, 192, 295, 296, 304,
336, 345
Mu awiya, 21-23, 28, 88
Muba/i, 73, 348
Mubtadi , 307 ; cf. bid a
Mufti, 115; cf. fatwa
Mahajirs, 8, 13, 20
MuAammad, the Prophet, 7-13, 16-
22, 28, 30, 35, 37, 42-45, 56, 57,
58, 67-75, 83, 86-89, 95, 104-
106, 112, 120-133, 140-150, 155,
160, 161, 164, 165, 171, 172, 175-
180, 188, 210, 227-231, 243, 245,
249, 253, 254, 263, 270, 275-278,
284, 285, 292-294, 298, 305, 308,
312, 335, 336, 345, 346, 349, 350,
351
MuAammad II, Ottoman Sultan,
113
Muhammad al- AUaf; see Abu
Hudhayl
MuAammad al-Muntazar, 187
MuAammad an-Naqshbandi, 267
MuAammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab,
60,283
Muhammad ibn Abt Bakr, 18
Mu/iammad ibn al-1/anafiya, 29,
31
MuAamrnad ibn al-JEfasan, 38, 96,
102
Muhammad ibn AK as-Sanwsi;
see as-Sansi
Mu/niminad ibn Isma il, 42, 43, 45
MuAarram, 347
Al-MuAasibt ; see Al-^zrith
MuMath, 309 ; cf. hadith, huduth
MuAdith, 309, 321
Mu^san, 355
MuAyi ad-Dn ibn Arabi ; see Ibn
Arabi
Al-Mu izz, Fatimid Khalifa, 170
Mujassim, 191, 291; cf. jism&gt;
tajsim
Mwjid, 325
Mu jiza, 141, 151, 313, 345
Mujtahid, 38, 116, 275, 287, 315
Mujtahidwn bil-fatwa, 113
Mujtahidwn fi-1-madhahib, 113
Mujtahidwn muilaq, 112
Mukallaf, 280, 317, 318, 321, 323,
342, 345 ; cf. taklif
Mukashafa, 227
Mukhabara, 354
Mukhalafa lil-Aawadith, 205, 210,
232, 280, 324
Mukhassis, 325
Mumathala, 338
Mu min, 126, 130, 350
Mumkinat, 330
Munkar, 296, 298, 305, 311
Munazzah, 324
382 INDEX OF NAMES AND ARABIC WORDS
Muntazar, 313; see, too, MuAam-
mad al-Muntazar
Muqallad, 316, 350 ; cf. taqlid
Al-Muqanna ( , 30
Munqidh min ad-dalal of al-Ghaz-
zali, 216, 235, 239
Muqarrab, 306.
Al-Muqtadir, Abbasid Kh., 184
Murabifs, 246, 251
Murji ites, 122-127, 129, 131, 132,
"""1717193, 214, 292
Murtadd, 24, 297
Mwsa, see Moses
Mwsa al-Qazam, 42
Musaqat, 354
Musallamat, 259
Musannaf, 79
Musaylima, 150
Mushabbih, 191 ; cf. bila kayfa
Mushahada, 327
Mushrik, 284, 299; cf. shirk,
aharik
Muslim, 80
Musnad, 79, 110
Al-Mus*afa, 300
Mustartabb, 73
MustaAil, 316
Mustansir, Fatimid Kh., 170
Mutakallims, 147, 186, 193-196,
215, 231, 262, 276, 337
Al-Mu tasim, Abbasid Kh., 167,
158, 162, 163
Mutaqabilat, 330
Al-Mutawakkil, Abbasid Kh.,
157, 162
Mutawatir, 308
Mu tazilites, 37, 57, 120, 130, 135-
138, 140, 143-146, 151-159, 166,
168, 171, 172, 175, 176, 184-196,
200, 207, 208, 211-214, 220-226,
241, 248, 291-294, 298, 299, 311,
336, 337, 343, 344.
MuwaMids, 179, 207, 246-257, 261-
265, 284, 296, 307
Muwa^a of Malik ibn Anas, 78,
82, 101, 102
Al-Muzdar, 151
Mzab in Algeria, 26, 59
Nabateans, 44
Nabi, 263, 312, 345
Nabidh, 314
Nadhr, 356
Nafaqa, 355
Naf isa, The Lady, 173
Nafs, 234, 272, 334
Nahawand, 14, 133
Najasat, 352
Najd, 60
Najjarites, 292
Nakir, 296, 298, 305, 311
Naqi b, 268
Naql, 120, 148, 157, 214, 269, 297, 310
Naqshbandite darwishes, 267
Narbonne, 83
An-Nasafi, 193, 207, 277, 308
An-Nasa i, 81, 152
Nasir ibn Khusraw, 170
An-N&lt;wir, Mamlwk Sultan, 277
An-Nasr al-Manbiji, 277
Nass, 29, 95, 292
Naysabwr, 217, 229
Nazr, 208
An-Nazzam, 140, 143, 152
Neo-Platonism, 163, 164, 168, 180,
181, 196, 232, 235, 236, 253,
255, 264, 272
NikaA, 354
Nisba, 337
Nizam al-Mulk, 213, 217, 218
Nkamite Academy, 213, 217
Noah, or NwA, 42, 43, 345
Nusayrites, 59
Old Man of the Mountain, Shaykh
al-jabal, 49
Ottoman Sultan, 10, 56, 58, 59
Ottoman Turks, 36, 52, 53, 54, 60
INDEX OF NAMES AND ARABIC WORDS 383
Pan-Islamic movement, 59
Par sees, 194
People of Paradise, 139
People of the Sunna, 336, 337
Persia, Persian, 14, 23, 31, 36-41,
44, 49, 50, 51, 82, 131-134, 150,
155, 157, 184
Persian Gulf, 60
Persian mysticism, 5
Plato, 134, 162-165, 235
Plotinus, Plotinian, 163-165, 182,
231, 256, 269, 280
Porphyrius, 163
Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite,
181, 182
Ptolemaic system, 233
Ptolemy, 134
Pythagoreanism, 168, 170
Q&da, 291, 295, 342, 356
Qadar, 128, 135-137, 242, 291, 293,
295,342
Qadarites, 122, 127-132, 135, 137,
140, 292, 344
Qadi, 115, 156, 245, 356
Qadim, 143, 300, 322, 343
Al-Qadir, Abbasid Kh., 193-195
Qadir, 319
Qadirite darwishes, 267, 269
Al-Qadisiya, 14, 133
Qanwns, 114
Qarmadans, 44, 46, 170, 184, 188
Qasm. 356
Qattat, 350
Qawl, 296
Qidam, 322
Qirad, 354
Qisas, 355
Al-Qiyama, 349 ; cf. Yawm
Qiyam bin-nafs, 325
Qiyas, 87, 94, 209, 247; 347
Qubda, 329
Qudra, 192, 234, 294, 310, 319, 322,
328, 344
Al-Qudra al-azaliya, 234
Qur an, 24, 42, 62, 69-71, 76, 77, 85,
94-96, 99, 103-106, 109, 117,
121, 128-130, 135, 138-141, 145-
152, 155-158, 161-163, 171, 178,
188, 190, 195-198, 206, 209, 210,
231, 235, 238, 241, 245-249, 252,
253, 257-259, 263, 271, 272-275,
282-284, 295, 297, 303,304,310,
335, 345, 346
Quraysh, 10, 57, 305, 313
Al-Qushayn, 213
Qu*b, 268, 282
Qwwa, 328
Rabelais, 199
Rabi a, 173
Rafidites, 212
Rahib, 125, 172
Rahn, 354
Ramadan, 188, 292, 293
Ar-Rashid, the MuwaMia, 363,
264
Rasa il ikhwan as-safa, 168
Raswl, 263, 308, 312, 345
Ra y, 86, 94
Razq, 338
Red Sea, 60
Responsa prudentium, 85
Rirfa, 310
Rifa ite darwfshes, 267, 268
Risala, 292
Risala of al-Qushayri, 213
Ritschl, 238
Rizq, 179, 298, 299, 311, 317
Rw/i, 141, 231, 272
Rukhsa, 283
Ru ya, 310, 344
As-sa a, 293, 294, 315
Sabil Allah, 18
Sab inite darwishes, 267
Sab iya, 42
Sa da, 36
384 INDEX OF THAMES AND ARABIC WORDS
Sa d ad-Din ; see at-Taftazani
&afawids, 38
As-SaffaA, Abbasid Kh. , 32
Saghira, 127, 311, 349
Sahara, 62
Sahiba,, 294
Sahibs, 9, 16, 19, 71, 72, 75, 79, 88,
101, 105, 147, 180, 275, 276, 282,
283, 293, 297, 307, 314, 346
SaA fa, 75, 77, a35
tizhifa. of al-Bukhari, 35, 79-81
S&hih of Muslim, 80, ff.
Sa id ibn AAmad ibn Abd Allah,
45
Sa i/is, 172
Saladin ; see S&lah ad-Din
As-salaf, 157, 190, 297
Salah, 292, 343 ; cf. AslaA
iS ala/i ad-Din, 49, 241
Salam, 353
Salaman, 253, f.
Salamiya, 44
Salat, Salawat, 178, 292, 293, 352
SaliJi, the prophet, 346
Salim, Ottoman Sultan, 56
Saljwqs, 207
SalMAiqadim, 328
Sam , 292, 294, 333
Sama ad-Dunya, 297
Samara, 340
Samanids, 36
Samarqand, 82, 187, 207
Sami 1 , 337, 349
San a, 36
As-Sanwsi, Muhammad ibn Ah ,
61, 120, 244, 269, 273, 284
As-Sanwsi, MuAammad ibn Yu-
suf, 315-318, 322, 323, 328, 334,
341, 347
Sari as-Saqatt, 175-177, 268
Satan, 298, 299 ; cf. shaytan
Sawm, 292 ; cf. Siyam
Sayf ad-Dawla, the Hamdanid,
162, 165
Sayyid Murtada, 285, 300
Semites, Semitic, 5, 51, 125, 126,
182
Sergius, father of John of Damas
cus, 131
Seth, 43
Ash-Shadhili, 267, 269
Shadhilite darwishes, 267
Shahada, 356
Shafa a, 174, 296, 307, 311, 349
Ash-Shafi l i, 67, 103-111, 173, 187
Shafi ites, 110, 115
Shahs of Persia, 38
Shakk, 332
Shar , 345
Ash-Sha rani, 279, 281, 283, 285
Ash-Shahrastani, 213, 224, 291, 293
Shar i a, 282
Shari/s of Mecca, 58, 265
Shari/s of Morocco, 35, 59, 247
Sharik, 300, 321,326; cf. shirk,
mushrik
Shay , 159, 314, 322
Shaykh, 177
Shaykh al-Islam, 113
Shaykh l /lwan, 268
Shaytans, 304
Shem, 43
Ash-Shiblt, 176, 177, 225
Shihab ad-Din as-Suhrawardi, 241
Shi ites, Shi a, 5, 13, 19, 26-36, 39-
41, 48, 51, 52, 56, 59, 115, 116,
121, 123, 131, 159, 165, 184, 185,
193-195, 212, 247, 249, 292, 298
Shirk, 123, 127 ; cf. sharik, mush
rik
Shirka, 354
Shu ayb, 346
Shuf a, 354
As-Siddiq, 313
idq, 347
Sifa nafsiya, 319
Sifat, 136, 151, 291, 309
tfifat adh-dhat, 291
Sifat al-fi l, 291, 338
Sifat al-ma ( ani, 337
INDEX OF NAMES AND ARABIC WORDS 385
Alfat aqliya, 190
&ifat at-ta thir, 333
Sifat ma nawiya, 337
/Sifat salabiya, 328
Sijistan, 171
As-t&TcU, 296, 306, 311, 349
AS iyain, 353
Solomon, 286
Spain, 33, 82, 132, 194, 209, 246
Spanish Islam, 132 ,
Stephen bar Sudaili, 181
Stewart (Balfour) and Tait, 235
Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, 48
Sui , 130
Sufi, Sttf iism, 130, 172, 173, 176-
178, 185, 213, 216-219, 222, 225-
229, 232, 235, 236, 239, 248,
250, 252, 253, 261, 262, 264, 267,
268, 274, 276-278, 282, 284, 309
Swfisftqtya, 308
Sufiy&, 173
Sufyan ath-Thawri, 97, 98
Sughra of as-San?/si, 341
As-Suhrawardi; see Shihab ad-Din
Sulayman the Great, 54
Sulh, 354
Sunna, 74, 75, 88, 190, 282, 293, 297,
298, 307, 345
Sunan, 75, 81
Sunnites, 19, 35, 38,51, 52, 59, 116,
194, 247, 298
Swra, 232
Suso, the mystic, 180
Syria, 21-23, 28, 45, 46, 49, 50, 82,
84, 98, 131,226
Ta addud, 339
Ta allaqa, 328
Ta alluqu-1-qabdati, 329
Tab , 328, 339
Tabaristan, 36
Tabi iywn, 161, 221, 293, 346
Tabhgh, 347
Tabor, Mount, 178
Tadbir, 357
TatfKl, 292
Tafoili, 316
At-Taftazani, 242, 269, 308, 318,
345, 346
Tahafutof al-Ghazzoli, 229, 237,
240, 257, 286
Tahara, 851
At-Tuhawi, 187, 193
TaAKl, 276
TaAsin, 292
Tajsim, 209, 246
Takallam, 147
Takf ir, 292
Taklif, 137, 310
Takwm, 310, 338
Talaq, 355
2alAa, 21, 25
Ta lil, 339
Ta lim, 197
Ta limites, 197, 219, 224, 228
Tanjm, 328
TaqbiA, 292
Taqiya, 126
Taqltd, 209, 217, 246, 261, 270, 286,
316, 318, 323, 350
Tariqa, 282
Tasalsul, 201, 322
Tasdtq, 312, 350
Tawallud, 142, 144
Tawakkul, 179, f.
Tawba, 292, 349
Taw/ud, 156, 175, 176, 246, 291, 300,
315, 349 ; cf. muwaMid
Ta wil, 246
Tawlid, 142
Tawrat, 303
Tayammum, 352
Theodorus Abucara, 132
Thiqa, 293, 296
The Thousand and One Nights, 97,
286
Thunmma ibn Ashras, 144
Tigris, 50, 133
At-Tirmidhi, 81
Toledo, 82
386 INDEX OF NAMES AND ARABIC WORDS
Tours, 82, f.
Tripolis, 62
Tufan, 329, f.
Tughril Beg, 52, 207, 212, f.
Turkish mysticism, 5
Tus, 216, 229, 230, 267
The Twelve Tables, 85
Ubayd Allah al-Mahdi, 45, 46, 244
UdAiya, 356
Ulama, 54, 233, 307
Uluhiya, 326
Ulw-l- azm, 345
Uman, 24, 26, 59
Umar ibn Abd al- Aziz, Umayyad
Kh.. 104
Umar ibn al-Khaab, 2nd Kh.,
13-19, 23, 24, 36, 44, 56, 86, 93,
165, 275, 297, 307, 313, 346
Umar al-Khayyam, 198, 199
Umar ibn al-Farid, 266
Umayya, 10, 16
Umayyads, 9, 17-19, 22, 25, 27, 32,
33, 53, 77, 78, 88-93, 104, 123,
131, 133, 153, 209
Umayyads of Cordova, 45
Umm walad, 357
Urf, 94, 113
Uthman ibn Affan, 3rd Kh., 17-
22, 25, 36, 71, 297, 307, 313, 346
Vincent of Lerins, 101
Volubilis, 35
Wa d, 292
Wadi a, 354
WaAdamya, 325
Al-Wahhab, 211
Wahhabites, 60-62, 109, 113, 115,
120, 273, 278, 279, 283-285
Al-Wahib, 211
WaAy, 281
Wa id, Wa idites, 129, 292
Wajib, 73, 316, 318
Wakala, 354
Wala, 357
Walad, 294, 330
WaK, 139, 173, 263, 267, 268, 274,
275, 281-285, 313, 326
Walima, 355
Wahya, 173
Waqf, 354
Warith, 354
Wo-sil ibn Ata, 37, 129, 135, 136,
150
Wasiya, 354
Wasi ya of Ibn Sma, 198, 228
Al-Wathiq, Abbasid Kh. , 157
Wudu, 318, 352
Wujwd, 159, 191, 316-319, 352
Wuswl, 228
Yajwj, 315
Al-Yaman, 60, 284
Yamin, 356
Ya q?fb ; see Jacob
Yathrib, 67
Yawm al-qiyama, 295, 349
Yazid, 19, 28
Yehuda Halevi, 237
Zabbwr, 304
Zabid in Tihama, 285
Zahid, 173, 180
Zahida, 173
Zahir, 314
Zahirites, 110, 112, 208, 209, 247,
249, 252, 261, 264, 287
Zahr, 42
Zakat, 292, 293, 353
Az-Zamakhshari, 195
Zann, 332
Zanzibar, 26, 59, 115
Zaydites, 36, 37, 46, 57, 59, 116,
188
Zihar, 355
Zina, 355
Zindi qs, 134
Zoroastrianism, 133, 134, 183
Az-Zubayr, 21, 25
Az-Zuhri, 91
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